


Visitor

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Break Up, F/M, Introspection, Reunited and It Feels So Good, Sickfic, Slow Build, Speculation, Spoilers, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2018-04-13 11:20:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 30,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4519953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At least he's guaranteed to see her once a year.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Resident](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5301983) by [leiascully](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully). 



> Timeline: revival speculation  
> A/N: From a one-shot to almost thirty thousand words, plus [Scully's side of the story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5301983). Thank you.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

She still takes him apart with cool hands, but it's as impersonal as the way she cleaned her gun. Cleans her gun, he corrects himself. She's packing heat again, wearing Special Agent in front of her name. She continues to be his doctor as a courtesy, because she's been his doctor for twenty years, but mostly because his medical history is too complicated to explain to anyone else. 

He sits in her office and waits for her. At least he's guaranteed to see her once a year. He tried to take himself off her calendar once, and she just looked at him with winter sky eyes, icing over. 

"Mulder, if you don't come in for a wellness exam, your insurance premiums will go up. Don't be ridiculous."

At least she didn't call him Mister Mulder. He's not sure he could stand that. She doesn't pretend there was never anything between them, but in a way that's worse. There's a ten-foot thick lead wall but through the little window, he can glimpse the way they used to be. MulderandScully, all one word, of one mind when it came to dealing with the rest of the world. 

Now there's Mulder. Now there's Special Agent Dana Scully, M.D. She made it out of the woods, but he lingers under the shadow of the treeline, afraid of the light, or so it seems. This is what twenty years of monster mashing does to a guy, and twenty-five years of letting himself get sliced open over and over by the shards of his shattered childhood. This is what dying does. He thinks of Micah Hoffman's account of Jesus' life after the resurrection and wishes he could read it. There aren't a lot of tips, no "Surviving Your Funeral For Dummies". He's been crawling back out of a six-foot hole for more than a decade now. 

He doesn't blame her for leaving. He'd leave himself if he could. The house is a nest of newspapers and articles. He's no better than Tooms. He crowded her out with the detritus of his obsessions. He thought they were making a space together, but he never did manage to requisition a desk for her, back in the basement days. Maybe he doesn't know how to make a life with someone, after his lonely house and his lonely apartment. Maybe they were only ever living in parallel. Now they skew, rarely intersecting.

"I just thought we were done with this," she had said, voice hollow and aching. "What happened to letting go of the darkness, Mulder?" 

"I'm not sure I know how," he'd said. 

"I'm not sure you do either," she'd said.

He was on the couch, frozen like a deer watching its doom approach. She was in the doorway. She hadn't even taken her coat off. His fingers were smudged with newsprint. He kept rubbing the tips of them together. It was the only part of his body he could move. His heart was a cold chunk of granite, pinning him to the cushions with its weight. His lungs rasped against it every time he tried to breathe. 

"I can…" he said, but she was already shaking her head. 

"You can't," she told him. "The truth is, you can't. And I can't either. Not anymore."

"Scully," he said. 

She was crying. And then she was gone. One by one, her things disappeared from the house until all that was left was non-essentials. Half-empty shampoo bottles. A couple of pairs of underwear she never wore. A few CDs. A pair of gloves. He's still picking her hairs out of the carpet. He comes across something new every so often, some other discarded artifact of their failed experiment. He doesn't touch them. He doesn't have the heart for archaeology. 

She knocks before she comes in, as if he's just another patient. 

"Hey, Scully," he says, and his chest aches. He's probably having a heart attack. 

"Mulder," she says, and there's nothing in it but his name. "How are you feeling?"

"Fine," he tells her. "I feel fine."

He's lying and she knows it. She's always had x-ray vision when it comes to him. "Are you sleeping?"

"Oh, yeah, six, seven hours a night." He does try. He lies on his side of the bed in the dark and listens to himself breathe. It's marginally unbearable, but he's too old for the couch. He wakes up in the morning, so he knows sleep eventually claims him, but his dreams are as achingly solitary as his life, so the line is blurred. 

"Have you been exercising?" She doesn't raise her eyes from her tablet as she checks off the answers to her doctor questions.

"Sure," he says. "Three, four times a week. I try to run. Lift a little."

Scully has him roll up his sleeve. He wore a blue shirt, the one he knows she liked. He unbuttons the cuff, remembering how deft she was, undressing him. It's the wrong time to think about that; somehow the memories it leads to are never of the times she stripped him down for medical reasons. At least that will be one more question answered. She takes his pulse first, two fingertips pressed into the inside of his wrist. He wants to lean into her touch, but he sits docilely. Somehow, even though she's standing close to him, there's a lot of space between them. She velcroes the cuff around his bicep, pumping it tight, and listens. Maybe there is something wrong with his heart. She jots notes to herself on the tablet, but doesn't ask him anything else. She presses the stethoscope to his chest and back, checks his eyes and his ears and his throat, and takes a little of his blood. She touches him as little as possible.

"They told me to schedule an appointment with the lab at the hospital for bloodwork," he says.

"It's fine," she tells him. "I'll let them know I already have a blood sample. I have a few tests I'd like to run."

"Is there something wrong?" he asks. 

"You're fine," she says. "But your medical history is unusual. I like to be thorough."

Jesus, he can't take this. "So how are you, Scully?"

"I'm fine, Mulder," she tells him. Her eyes are steady. Her cross glints in the hollow of her throat. He tries not to remember the taste of her skin. "Any concerns or complaints?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary," he says. 

"I'm glad to hear it," she says, and she does sound glad, but it's only an echo of the Scully he used to know. Used to live with. Used to wake up next to. Used to love so passionately he thought he'd turn inside out. They've been reduced to this parody of small talk. To be fair, he's reduced them to this. He used up what they had until there was nothing left, and never realized he was stealing the air from her lungs.

"We should catch up some time," he says. "Go for coffee. My treat."

"I'm a little busy, Mulder," she says, gazing at her tablet. Through the fringe of her lashes, he can see the screen reflected in her eyes. He can't remember when she stopped wearing glasses, but it must have been fifteen years ago. "I've got to get recertified in a number of areas. I'm sure you understand."

"Sure," he says. 

"Any other developments in your life?" she asks. 

"I'm seeing a therapist," he offers.

"Good," she says. "I'm glad you have someone to talk to."

The part of him that had hoped this admission would bring some warmth to her expression knots itself up a little tighter. The interest in her voice is no more than professional. 

"You've been through a lot, Mulder. It's good that you'll have someone who has the right training to help you." Someone who isn't me, her tone implies. But he knew that already. Dissecting the living is a risky proposition. 

"I hope so," he says. 

They're silent for a moment. He rolls down his shirt and rebuttons the cuff. She taps away at her screen. 

"I'll walk you out," she says.

"I think I know the way," he tells her. 

"Protocol," she says, with just a hint of a smile, and not the kind that always lingered in her eyes.

They navigate the corridors. Suited agents dodge around them. He doesn't hear a single whisper about Spooky Mulder, but several people nod firmly at Scully, and she nods back. 

"Don't forget to schedule your colorectal cancer screening," she tells him as they reach the front door. "At your age, it's important to start taking these measures. I'll have the hospital email you. And I'll call you when my schedule frees up."

He knows she won't. 

"It was good to see you, Mulder."

"You too," he says, and crumples his visitor badge in his hand as he walks away.


	2. Therapy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His therapist is very kind and very bland.

His therapist is very kind and very bland. Mulder's years at Oxford feel like ancient history, something he did in some other life, but he still understands this game. He's used his own illegible face to his advantage often enough in interrogations.

It's been a few months. He's not sure he's made any progress, but at least he doesn't have to come twice a week anymore. They've talked about his sister, his parents. They've talked about Diana and Phoebe. They've talked about William, a little. He tries to avoid talking about Scully, though he knows it's painfully evident the way he edges around the topic. It's not just that the lack of her jolts through him like the pain of a phantom limb. She's such a private person, neatly confined in her own skin. To talk about the life they shared feels like a violation of her trust, though he's sure she would be the first to tell him he needs to be open with his therapist.

Hypocrite, he thinks fondly. He knows she rarely saw her own therapist, though the Bureau encouraged it after her abduction. He knows she didn't talk about him the way she might have, that she cached the greatest part of her feelings in an undisclosed location before she opened the office door. But he understands. There's no good way to say "this person is everything to me" without sounding unbalanced. There's no way to explain that your partner is your heart and your mind without sounding fatally codependent. They spent those first five years desperately pretending there was nothing between them but the firm professional handshake of two people assigned to watch each other's backs. Maybe it was just that their work was an unending series of crises; in the heat of the moment, they revealed themselves to each other in order to survive. She was the eyes in the back of his head. She was the cautious whisper in his ear. She was the finger on the trigger of his weapon. She was the voice inside of him that said, "Now." She was the layers of kevlar over his heart.

His therapist takes notes. Mulder listens for the faint sounds of the nib scratching over the paper. Sometimes she's so quiet for so long that he almost falls asleep. He wonders if she gives him a discount for all the minutes of silence. 

"Do you think you and Dana would have become so close if you had been assigned to a more ordinary department?" 

"That's a question that can't be answered," he tells her, because he's too overeducated for his own good, because he's wasting his time and his money in this chair letting years of trusting no one but Scully keep him trapped in the grave he dug for himself. "The nature of the work encourages a certain intimacy. Partners have to be able to depend on each other."

"Were you as close to Reggie? Or Jerry?" He will say this: she either has a good memory or is diligent about reviewing her notes. The Bureau seems to have sent her a nice little dossier on him. She must sit in this office listening to a lot of special agents talk about how special they don't feel. Or maybe Scully prepared a few remarks. She is, after all, his doctor. There's honor among medical professionals.

"No," he says. "Scully is different."

The pen moves. "I've noticed that you always refer to Dana by her last name. Is there a reason for that?"

I had to hold her at arm's length, he doesn't say. At first it was a way to preserve my isolation and then it was a way to put enough space between us that she wouldn't notice that she was becoming my world, he doesn't say.

"Protocol," he says. "Kind of a self-reinforcing joke. Call a green recruit 'Agent Lastname' so they feel like they fit the job description."

"But you still call her 'Scully'," his therapist prompted. "Even after the two of you had a child together." 

He can't explain the way their names became talismans, the way they could put a whole speech into just one word. "Watch out" or "I love you" or "You're so full of shit your eyes are brown", all in a name. A Scully by any other name wouldn't be his partner. They invented an entire language and crammed it into two words replete with nuance.

He shrugs. "Habit."

"One thing we're trying to do in these sessions is change some old habits, Fox," his therapist says gently.

"I called her 'Dana' when her father died," he tells her. Things had still been mutable between them then. They might have left each other then, and been functional citizens, plausible friends and neighbors and lovers of other people.

"I understand it's difficult to alter these patterns of behavior," she says, "but you need to understand that people and relationships can change."

"I understand that," he says, his mouth dry.

"Maybe you could try referring to her as 'Dana' just in these sessions," she suggests. 

He looks down at his hands. "Sure."

"Tell me about being partnered with Dana," she says. 

He knows what they look like from the outside, him and Scully. What they looked like. He knows that codependency is an easy label to pin on them. She enabled his obsessions. He enabled her careful disengagement. She had been easy to befriend once, he thinks, her heart as open as a rose beginning to bloom. He had had friends too, before he'd discovered the ladder of success had lower, darker rungs that descended all the way to the basement. They became a pair of chronic underachievers together from the Bureau's point of view, or conceptualized their own definition of achievement. In the field they had nothing but each other, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others; she was his shield and his sidearm. Moment by moment, they were forged by the strangeness of the world into a self-contained unit. Maybe dysfunction had kept them together toward the end, but their isolation had honest beginnings. Who else could understand the hollow depth of his guilty sorrow? Who else could feel the weight on her narrow shoulders? Who else knew the horror of Tooms or Pusher or being eaten alive by a giant mushroom? Who else felt the same spark of tension seeing a slick of oil in a parking lot? They were the only witnesses to the vast uncanny potential of the world and to the shadowy machinations of the should-be protectors. They were the only tellers of implausible truths. In the face of that loneliness, they had turned to each other. It was the only saving grace. 

"Dana and I…" he begins, and stops, because her name feels so strange. His tongue trips over it. "The things that Dana and I investigated weren't easy to explain to other people. You would only believe them if you saw them."

"What did that mean for your partnership?" she asks quietly. 

"Neither of us could talk to other people about our work," he says, twisting his fingers together. "It feels like - it felt like - she was the only person who knew me. She was the only person who could understand what I'd been through. What we'd been through."

"Do you think that was true?"

"It _was_ true," he says, a little too sharply. "She was the only person I could believe. She was the only person I could trust. There was literally no one else who had seen the things we saw, and done the things we had done. Try telling your neighbor or your barista that you hunt monsters for a living."

"Is that how you saw your job at the Bureau?" she asks. 

"We investigated the unexplained," he says. "Dismissing that which can't be categorized as monstrous is a fairly common response." 

"Do you think that's how Dana saw your work?" she asks.

"She believed in the work," he says. "She wanted to bring justice to the victims of these crimes, whether the motivations or explanations of the criminals fit the usual profile or not."

"But you've told me her investment in the work wasn't the same as yours," his therapist prompts.

"I can't speak to her experiences," he says. "I can't speak to her motivations. But she was there, every time I needed her, without question. I don't need to work through my partnership with Scully. I need to work through _fucking dying_."

His voice is too loud in the quiet office. His fists are clenched in his lap.

"Our time is up for today," his therapist says. "But I'll make a note for next week. I appreciate your engagement in the process, Fox."

"Sure," he says, an emptiness in his chest. "Fine."


	3. Influenza

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You're just lucky your doctor still makes house calls."

There's something wrong. He's hot and he's dizzy. He hurts all over. It's like coming back from the dead, feeling the aches of god knows what that had been done to him, sweating in a cool room because his body didn't know what temperature it was supposed to be. In the mirror, his skin is greyish. His eyes are dull. 

He has to look for his phone. It's on the coffee table, under the book he was reading last night. It takes him a minute to find her number as he squints at the screen.

"Scully," she says, cool and crisp as the weather outside. 

"Sorry," he says. "I'm sick."

"What are your symptoms, Mulder?" she asks. 

"Hot," he says. "I hurt. I don't look right. I don't feel right." His tongue is thick in his mouth. His lips are dry and chapped. 

"I'll be right there," she says. "Just lie down."

She still has a key to the house. He had no reason to change the locks. He wants her to come home. He drags himself to the couch. The texture of the leather almost overwhelms him. The rustle of papers as the heating kicks on is loud in his ears. He hates the way the heat from his breath lingers on the pillow, but it hurts too much to move.

He's dozing when she comes in. The sounds of her are so familiar that for a moment he forgets that he's sick, he forgets that she's gone. It comes back when he tries to lift his head and the blood pounds behind his eyes. She kneels down next to him and touches the backs of her fingers to his forehead. 

"Sorry," he says.

"You don't have to be sorry," she tells him. "Mulder, you're burning up."

"Am I dying?" he asks.

"No," she says. "No, Mulder. I think you have the flu."

"You might not know," he says. His throat is sore and the words rasp out of him. 

"I'll do a flu test," she says, "but you look pretty textbook to me." She moves away. The loss of her is like the feel of velcro separating. He hears her in the kitchen. Her movements are sure and certain. She only has to open one cabinet to find a glass, and one to find the acetaminophen. She brings back three tablets and a glass of water. He fumbles the pills into his mouth and she helps him steady the glass. 

"Mulder, I'll be back in a little while. Just try to sleep, and drink your water."

"Scully," he says into his pillow. She rests her hand on his foot. 

"I need to make arrangements for my class this afternoon, and I need clothes, and I need to pick up a few things from the pharmacy."

"Sorry," he says, and it feels like it's all he's been saying.

"It's all right," she says. "Just sleep."

He does, but not willingly. 

"Open your mouth," she says, later, and he's rewarded with a cotton swab in his throat. He swallows painfully. "That's going to tell me that you have the flu. Normal, human, terrestrial flu. Did you get your vaccine?"

He shakes his head wearily. 

"Next time, I'll order them in advance and give them to you myself," she says. She isn't smiling. She used to smile when she said things like that, indulging him in his need for her. 

She stands up and walks back into the kitchen. There's a rattle and then the sound of the faucet. The stove clicks and catches. 

"That explains where my tea kettle went," she says, loud enough for him to hear. 

"Never went anywhere," he says in the pillow. _Not like you_ , he thinks.

She comes out again with a hot mug of something that doesn't smell right, even to his limited senses, and one that smells like peppermint. It's the wrong one that she sets on the table in front of him. "Let that cool down."

He watches her go to the bookshelf and pick up something from the shelf where he put all the things she left. She kicks off her shoes and curls up in the big chair in the corner, setting her tea on the side table they bought together in a little antique mall. 

"What's happening?" he asks.

"Mulder, I'm not going to leave you alone," she says calmly. "You have the flu. You need someone to take care of you for a few days." 

"No, it's okay," he says, struggling to sit up. His head spins. 

"It's not a problem," she says. "You're just lucky your doctor still makes house calls." There's a flicker there of her old humor, but he's too busy slumping back down to comment. He naps and she reads and drinks her tea. She nudges him awake at one point and makes him slurp down the nasty-smelling stuff from his mug. It tastes as bad as promised. She's carrying a bundle of something in her arms - the sheets from his bed. Their bed. He hears the washer start. 

"You're staying?" he asks. 

"You're sick," she says. "Just rest." 

He wakes up again when she's carrying the clean sheets back. The rustle of cotton as she shakes out the various layers carries down the stairs. He lies there, restless and drowsy, listening to her make their bed. He helped her do it enough times over the years to know her particularly way of folding the corners of the sheet under. It always stayed put when she did it. When he made the bed it all came undone as soon as they shifted. "Navy family," she said once, when she saw him watching. "Everything shipshape."

His life is not shipshape. It yaws like a dory in a storm. He's not sure the couch isn't rolling under him. He puts his arm over his eyes as she comes back down the stairs. 

"Could you eat some soup?" she asks.

He frowns at his forearm. "Do I have to?"

"I'll go and make you some," she says. "It would be good if you could get some calories into you."

"I can do it," he says. "If you just leave me the soup and the medicine. I can take care of myself."

She doesn't even say anything. She just goes into the kitchen and he hears the snap and creak of a can opening. In a few minutes, he has a mug of soup. He's going to be out of mugs soon.

"What are you going to eat?" he asks. He sniffs at the soup, as if he isn't too stuffed up to smell it now. Campbell's standard. At least it tastes familiar. 

"I'll find something," she says, settling into her chair again. He struggles to get the soup down as she watches him with eyes that give away nothing. He manages to eat all of it, but then he sets down the mug and there's nothing to do. She goes back to her book. He picks up one of the articles from the coffee table, but he can't focus on the words. He reads the same sentence five times before he gives up. He taps his fingers wearily on the couch. She turns the page of her book.

"Read to me," he says. 

"Mulder, I'm not going to read to you," she tells him, but for a second he thinks he hears a smile in her voice and he remembers the Florida woods and her tuneless croon. 

"I can't sleep," he whines, and hates himself for whining. Her presence is a precious gift; he can't drive her away. 

"Do you want the tv?" she asks.

"I want you to read to me." 

She gazes at him for a moment and then down at the page. "'"Oh, you get used to anything," I said, annoyed with myself, for actually I was proud of the place'," she begins, and keeps on. 

He can't follow the story, but just the sound of her voice soothes him. He watches the way that her hair slides over her face. She looks thinner, now that she's not striding around in charge. Her cheekbones cast sharp shadows. She reads to him and he drinks her in. Nothing from the pharmacy will soothe him as much as having her here does. She's always been his panacea, his cure-all. She's always put him back together when he's broken down. But this, he thinks, is fixing the cracked mirror on the car when the real problem is that the transmission won't shift gears. He's trapped again in a vehicle that's hurtling down the highway and he wants to stop, he does, he wants to get out of the damn car but he doesn't know how and he's afraid that it's always been too late. But Scully reads to him and things slow down, and if he can't get out of the car, he can at least enjoy the scenery.

His life is a car. His life is a boat. He's mixing his metaphors and he's too dizzy to care. He runs his fingers over his face to feel the heat. The scars on his cheeks have faded, but he remembers where they were. Scully's voice goes up and down and he just lets it rock him.

When he's drowsing again, she lays him down with gentle hands and covers him with a blanket. 

"I'd put you to bed, but it will be easier for you down here," she tells him. 

He thinks or he dreams, that he asks her, "Do you think about coming home?"

She pauses at the bottom of the stairs. The light haloes her head. She's changed her hair; the red is the glint of sunshine now, not of foxfur. "I think about you," she says. "I think about us. But I don't say it anymore. I don't want to hurt you."

His heart aches more than the rest of him. When he wakes up, his pillow is damp, but he's not sure if it's sweat or tears. She doesn't mention talking to him, just takes his temperature and makes him drink orange juice and eat toast. She goes out to teach a class in the middle of the day after dosing him with more nasty medicine. He sleeps, and wakes, and stumbles to the bathroom, and remembers to call his therapist to cancel his appointment. She sounds disappointed in him. 

"Dana's with you?" she asks.

"Not at the moment," he tells her. "She went to work."

"I'm not sure this is healthy for you, Fox," she says.

"I'm not healthy," he snaps. "And I'm her only patient who's currently alive. Apparently she has an interest in keeping me that way. I didn't ask her to come."

"I hope you feel better soon," his therapist says soothingly. "I'll see you next week." 

Scully comes back with a book on CD and soup from the deli that he likes. " _Watership Down_ ," she says. "Although apparently it isn't about ships." This time they eat together, him on his couch, her in her chair, listening to the book. They've had probably thousands of meals together, in the office, on the road, in diners and truck stops and whatever restaurant the hotel front desk recommended, at their own table in their own house. Even when they were sick of each other, they would eat together, a moment of detente. This feels like that, and he relishes it. There are truths he doesn't need to seek. At least this isn't the couch from his old apartment, with the sum of their history stuffed down between the cushions.

She stays for the better part of a week. One of the days is his birthday; she brings him a black and white cookie and a book about string theory. "Happy birthday," it says inside the front cover. She signed it "Dana." He tucks it under his pillow so it won't get lost among the heaps on the table. Every night she takes his temperature and then climbs the stairs to their bedroom. He wonders how well she sleeps, if she sprawls across his side of the bed. He doubts it. She's always been such a tidy bundle of a person. She tells him that his immune system could use a boost, that he should start taking vitamins. He promises to do as he's told. He doesn't ask her about any of the things he'd like to ask her about. He doesn't talk about William. He doesn't talk about therapy. He doesn't ask her about work.

"Scully," he says as she's packing her things. He's well enough to walk around again. He watches her eye the teakettle and then resign herself to abandoning it again. It's got his fingerprints on it. Maybe she wouldn't want to carry them into her new place, which he hasn't seen. He is trying to give her space. He is trying. He hopes she knows. 

"Hmm?" she says. "This bread will go moldy if you don't keep it in the fridge."

"Thanks," he says, wishing his pajama pants had pockets he could put his hands in. He settles for crossing his arms. "For taking care of me."

"It would be unethical not to care for my patient," she says, and he can't help recoiling just a little. She looks at him and softens. 

"I do care, Mulder," she says, keeping her distance. "I just can't be with you right now. I can't live in the darkness all of the time. There has to be some kind of respite. And I can't be your only light. I want you to get better. If I stay, then nothing ever changes. We just play the same roles and fight the same fights and both of us deserve more than that."

He feels weak all over again. 

"I'll call you to see how you're feeling in a few days," she says. He knows she will. She is assiduously interested in his health. She's written journal articles about his recovery. He makes a better specimen than a significant other. That isn't her fault. 

"Take your vitamins," she tells him, shouldering her bag.

The door closes behind her with a sound like a coffin lid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Scully is reading _Breakfast At Tiffany's_. I have taken liberties with a quote from Marguerite Duras.


	4. Release

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not a miracle, but a beginning.

October goes by in a muddle, his weeks punctuated by therapy sessions and the occasional call from Skinner. November is the same, the days as bleak and thin and grey as gruel. Maggie invites him to Thanksgiving, but between Scully and Bill Junior and Bill's various Mulder-scorning children, he isn't sure he can handle it. She brings him leftovers in coordinated Tupperware containers.

"How are you, Fox?" she asks, putting her hand on his in a gesture that's painfully like Scully's.

"I'm surviving," he tells her. 

"Sometimes that's the hardest part," Maggie tells him, and he thinks of everything she has lost. It's a miracle that her heart is still beating. 

"Don't be a stranger," she tells him. "No matter how things are between you and Dana, you will always be welcome in my house."

He hugs her when she leaves. She's surprisingly frail in his arms.

He eats the leftovers and washes the Tupperware. He takes his vitamins. The sun keeps coming up.

\+ + + + 

"What was the hardest part of coming back?" his therapist asks.

"Everything had changed," he says, leaning back in the chair so he doesn't have to look at her. "Everything. Scu- Dana was pregnant, which I'd thought was impossible. They'd assigned another agent to the X-Files, which was at the least highly improbable, because last I knew, they were trying to shut us down. It wasn't anything I could prepare for. It wasn't anything I could fight against. Like Rip Van Winkle, I woke up in a whole new world and everything was different except my apartment."

"Why did you feel like you needed to fight it?" his therapist asks.

"That's the instinct, isn't it," he says. "Fight or flight. Flight was rarely an option for us. We always had our backs against the wall."

"Fight or flight is a fear response," his therapist reminds him. "What were you afraid of, Fox?"

He puts his hands over his face and scrubs at his eyes. "Losing."

"Losing…?" his therapist prompts.

"Losing Scully. Losing the baby. Losing my work," he says. "Losing my life in a metaphorical sense. I died and everyone else went on without me."

"Do you think that was easy for them?" his therapist asks.

 

"Easier than it would have been for me," he says. 

His therapist just makes a "hmm" noise and lets the silence ooze out like molasses.

"In a very real way, I was afraid of losing the battle that I perceived we'd been fighting for most of a decade," he says slowly. "The battle for humanity. The battle to stop the shadow consortium embedded in our government, who had taken innocent citizens and experimented on them. The battle to stop the alien colonists from invading our planet."

"And what happened?" his therapist asks.

He shrugs. "Nothing. The invasion didn't happen. Colonization didn't happen. The super-soldiers didn't happen. The end of the world didn't happen. A whole lot of nothing."

"Did that make you feel better, knowing that the events you had feared had not come to pass?"

"No," he says. "I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm still waiting. Any day could be the day. Any day I could wake up to hovering ships or soldiers at the door or my skin falling off. In the meantime, I've spent the last twenty years of my life playing the role of Chicken Little. But if the sky falls and nobody notices, do I still sound like a horse's ass?"

"Has the sky fallen?" his therapist asks.

"Close enough for government work," he says, and knows he's being flippant. Scully would give him an exquisitely arched eyebrow if she were here, the one that says, "You need to participate in your own healing, even if it hurts, and wit doesn't close wounds." She's right. His therapist is right. They're all right. And after all of it, the sky fell: he lost Scully, they lost William, he lost his job, but he's still here, and he's still standing, even if his footing isn't sure. 

He isn't afraid of the effort it will take to find some kind of steady ground inside himself. He's never been afraid of the effort. He's devoted himself completely to less worthy causes than his own salvation. What he's afraid of is that he'll make the effort and it will never be enough, the way that all the evidence he and Scully compiled was never enough to expose the sordid machinations of the Syndicate, never enough to stop the avalanche his fathers had started. If he never passes the Bureau's psych eval, if he and Scully never find a way not to destroy each other, if he never finds out what happened to his son, well, at least he's still alive. After the apocalypse, or lack thereof, there is a time to rebuild, to fail again and fail better. He came back from a dead stop to a flat out sprint, trying to keep up with the pace life had set, and he hasn't stopped running since. Of course he's tired. Of course he's lost. He sighs, and feels a little bit of the tension inside him unwind. Not a miracle, but a beginning. 

"Fox, I'd like to suggest that you consider a kind of therapy called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing," his therapist says. "I think it might help you process some of these memories without becoming overwhelmed by the associated emotions. I'd also like you to consider taking an antidepressant for a few months."

"Okay," he says, surprising himself. He never thought he'd accept medication from anybody but Scully again, but the worst has already happened. He's got nothing to lose, even if his pills are laced with hallucinogens or poison or an alien vaccine. Maybe the simplest explanation, however outlandish it might have once seemed, is true. Maybe there's hope. Maybe he doesn't have to feel this way anymore. Maybe he doesn't have to carry the sins of his fathers to his grave again. Maybe he's free. 

"Thank you for being open to these possibilities," she says, and he laughs. "Is something funny?"

"Nobody's ever thanked me for that before," he says. "At least, not anybody with any credibility."

"One amazing thing about the world is that life keeps giving us chances," she says. "I'll schedule your first EMDR appointment and I'll call your prescription into the pharmacy. Make sure you follow the directions. It's very important that you build up gradually. The pharmacist should explain it to you, but call me if you have any questions."

"I will," he says.

She smiles. "I'll see you next week, Fox."

The pharmacist is extremely thorough, but Mulder passes the pop quiz. His memory isn't what it used to be, but he's not that far gone. Before he leaves, he buys a packet of slim candles. The holiday things are easy to find, thanks to Scully's methodical boxing and labeling. He blows the dust off the menorah and mumbles the words of the prayer to himself. They taste like bitter herbs in his mouth, but it's a start. It's a change.

The flames are small in the dark, empty room, but night by night, they cast enough light to see by.

\+ + + + 

The therapy is strange. He moves his eyes back and forth, or taps his fingers, and thinks of all the worst things that ever happened to him, but somehow, it helps. Like cleaning out a wound or getting a deep tissue massage, the benefit is worth the agony. The pills help too. One morning he wakes up and there isn't a weight on him, pinning him to the mattress, or at least, it's light enough that he isn't incapacitated.

He goes out and buys Christmas presents for Scully and Maggie. He has a bottle of whiskey sent to Skinner's office. The Scullys still do Christmas at 6 a.m. Maggie gives him a cup of coffee and a grey tie. Scully gives him a small smile.

"I'm not trying to intrude," he tells her in a quiet corner. Bill glares at him. "Your mom seemed disappointed when I didn't come for Thanksgiving."

"It's fine, Mulder," she says, and there doesn't seem to be any double meaning in it. A Christmas miracle. Yes, Mulder, there is a Santa Claus, and you've been good this year. "Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas," he says. She tips her face up for a kiss on the cheek. He makes his excuses and leaves before she opens his gift. 

He isn't completely surprised when the doorbell rings that evening. It's snowing and the flakes are caught in Scully's hair. 

"You don't have to ring the doorbell," he says. "This is your house too."

Her eyes search his face. The porch light turns them into fathomless pools of blue. He could drown in those eyes, or fall through them to the other side of the world. 

"Mulder, what are you doing?" she asks.

"Living," he says. "Do you want to come in?"

She reaches up and cups her hands around his face and pulls him down for a kiss. His arms slip automatically around her waist. They stand there, lost in each other, for a long moment. The heat from the house washes around their bodies and into the night. When she pulls back, the glow of the Santa next door glazes her hair with copper. She takes his hand and leads him inside. He locks the door behind them. She's already walking up the stairs. 

They undress each other without speaking. He remembers the first time she bared herself to him, in the hotel in Oregon. Back then he wrapped her back up like a fragile package. He knows better now. Her skin is the only thing about her that bruises easily. They were young then, and arrogant, but twenty years later, she still overawes him. She lifts her chin and lets him kiss the pale line of her throat. Her hands explore him. She still knows every scar. Even where he has no sensation in his skin, he can still feel her touch. 

"If we don't let go," she whispers, "how will we ever know if we can be whole on our own?"

He has no answer for that. He only holds her closer, and she fits herself against him the way she always did. Whatever mess their minds have made of their lives, their bodies have always worked together. They make love with a melancholy tenderness, the glare of the neighbor's Christmas lights throwing colored shadows across their skin. He focuses on her pleasure, not the way he once did, desperate to make her stay, but because he wants to give her this, one uncomplicated moment of release, if anything between them could ever be anything less than fraught. She opens her eyes and in the dim he watches the waves crash over her. 

"I'm here," he says. "I'm here." She holds onto him without clinging. The blue of her eyes is swallowed up by darkness. When he loses himself in her, she strokes his hair and murmurs his name. 

They fall asleep wrapped up in each other, her knee wedged between his, her hair spilling over his face.

In the morning she's gone, and he's not surprised by that either. He gets up and showers the scent of her off his skin with a gentle reluctance. He takes his vitamins and his meds. He brushes a few red hairs off the pillows. 

Some gifts are sufficient.

\+ + + + 

He sends flowers for her birthday - he has a standing order with the florist, and he thinks she got a bouquet even when he was temporarily deceased - and she calls to thank him.

"Can I take you out to dinner?" he asks. "Just dinner."

"I've got plans," she says, "but thank you for offering."

"Say hi to your mom for me," he tells her.

She pauses. "I've got a date, Mulder."

"Oh," he says. 

"We've been out a few times," she tells him.

"Is it serious?" he asks.

"I don't know," she says. "But I thought I should tell you."

"Thanks," he says. 

"I'll talk to you later," she says. "The flowers are beautiful."

She hangs up and he finds the world has not fallen to pieces.

\+ + + + 

His therapist is proud of him. He doesn't have panic attacks anymore when he passes a graveyard. He can talk about his lost time without shouting. In the moments that the gravity of his memories does flatten him, he has strategies to cope with it. He can gradually unbend himself, shifting the weight of the past until he can hold it comfortably. He throws out his jeans that don't fit and has his suits altered. He makes an appointment to retake his psych eval and the rest of his requalifications.

If he passes, he's not sure what he'll do, but that's progress too. Special Agent Fox Mulder is a look he can wear, but it's not the only one he owns anymore. 

\+ + + + 

He sends her flowers for Mother's Day too. Every year since they discovered the existence of Emily, he's tried to do a little something for her. It's not an easy occasion for either of them, but it's an important one. They still haven't talked about William, not the conversation they need to have, but this isn't the day for it. He's ready now, any time she's ready. 

He opens a bottle of wine, just in case. He's in the kitchen when she comes in, breezy in a silky blouse and a skirt that fits her like a glove. 

"Mulder," she says, her voice melting at the end, and he knows she came over ready for a fight. He gives her his most belly-up look. She clips to a stop, confusion and sorrow and sweetness creasing around her eyes. She is even more beautiful now than she was when they met. He has never loved her more. He has never loved her less.

"Happy Mother's Day," he says, handing her a glass. "Have a seat." He gestures towards the couch and she sits, looking distracted. 

"I'm not going to move back in just because you sent me flowers," she says. "Beautiful flowers, even." 

"I don't expect you to," he tells her, filling her glass. He sits down beside her.

She give him a skeptical look. "No ulterior motive?"

"I forgive you," he says. "I'm sorry I wasn't around. I should have found another way."

She sips at her wine. "And that's that?"

"No," he says. "But I hope it's a start." 

She sets down her glass and sighs. "It's a start."

Her thumb brushes over his cheekbone and he closes his eyes. He hears the creak of the couch and feels her other hand on his knee as she steadies herself. Her hot breath puffs against his cheek and then his lips brush hers. Their hands explore each other as if they haven't mapped out every inch of this territory over the years. There's always some surprise, he thinks, some undiscovered country. 

They keep most of their clothes on. Her skirt is too tight to hike up around her hips when she straddles his lap, so that ends up on the floor. His jeans hamper his ankles. It's not peaceful or kind, exactly, when they touch each other, but he didn't ever think it would be. There are things they can only say without words. She sinks her teeth into his shoulder when she comes and leaves a ring of lipstick on his shirt.

Afterwards, she gets dressed in the middle of the living room, settling her breasts back into her bra, tucking her shirt back into the sleek high waist of her skirt. 

"Is this all we'll ever be?" he asks, fumbling with his clothes. His fingers are still shaking. Her composure is astounding, but he can see the way her calf muscles quiver as she steps into her shoes.

"Ask me again sometime," she says, and leaves without kissing him.


	5. Inhale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What do you say?"

"You and Dana slept together?" his therapist asks. "I admit I find that surprising."

"You and me both, Doc," he says, and he sounds like himself again for a moment. Not that he was well-adjusted then, but at least he's retreated far enough from the precipice that he knows the view. 

"You sent her flowers," his therapist says. "Why?" 

"It was Mother's Day," he says. "She's the mother of my child." 

"No other motive?" her pen scratches over the paper. 

He pinches the bridge of his nose. "No. Just to tell her I remember. It's not an easy day for her."

"Hmm," his therapist says. 

"If I wanted to provoke some kind of conversation, I'd send her something on his birthday," he tells her.

"Your son's birthday?" she clarifies. 

"Yeah," he says wearily. "William. Wherever he is, he's fifteen now." 

"How long did you and Dana have with him?" his therapist asks. 

He sighs. "He was about eleven months when Dana gave him up for adoption. But I was only with them for about a week before I had to go."

"You had to go?" she says gently.

"I went," he says, a little brusque, but she's his therapist - if she doesn't know how furious and disgusted he's been with himself, she's not doing her job. "I felt like I had to go. I thought there were answers."

"Did you find what you needed?"

"Of course not," he says, weary to his bones of the whole story. The medication helps, the therapy helps, but he hasn't rewritten the course of his life. He hasn't made amends for his wrongs, and this one in particular. "The only truth I found was that I shouldn't have left." 

"What were you looking for?" she asks.

"Anything to keep them safe," he says, so fiercely he surprises himself. "Anything."

"You couldn't do that from DC?"

"I didn't believe it at the time," he says. "I thought they'd be safer without me. I thought I was the target of the men who sought our son. Fox Mulder, professional martyr." His voice is bitter even to his ears.

"Do you feel like she blamed you for going?" his therapist asks.

"No," he says. "No. Scully believed in me and the work. She believed we were in danger. She was disappointed, but she didn't blame me."

"Did you blame her for giving up your son for adoption?"

"No," he says. "Yes. She only did what she thought was right."

"But you've never spoken to each other in depth about your feelings about your son's adoption," his therapist clarifies.

He laughs, the sound rough in his throat. "What do you say?"

His therapist stays quiet, her pen moving in gentle circles at the top of her pad.

There are things they have never been able to say. There are things they have seen and done that there are no words for. No wonder that at crucial moments, they let their bodies speak for them. Hands say what lips can't. Tongues shape thoughts against skin. Pressure serves for intonation, urgency for volume. They reach some sort of understanding, although the respite is never permanent. They have been talking around their wounds for so many years, trying to ignore the pain of them, afraid it will overtake them if they pay it any attention. Afraid it will tear them apart. What they have now is all asunder; he can't damage it much further. If he has to live without ever touching her again, he can stomach that now. It is not the life he wants, but it is a life he can endure.

"When she asked me to be her donor," he begins, "that was the end of it. All she wanted of me - all I thought she wanted of me - was genetic material. We never talked about being a family. We never talked about being together. We never talked about it at all. We went to the clinic and I put my arms around her when she got the negative results, but there were lines drawn between us. It was her baby. Not our baby. Even after we were together, it was her grief that the in vitro had failed. Whatever I felt, she didn't ask me to share. She didn't ask me to share any of it."

He pauses and takes a deep breath. His chest aches. He taps his fingers on his knees, and it calms him a little. "Even when I came back, she didn't ask me. I was just there. She accepted me, she wanted me around, but she didn't ask. I don't know if maybe she was afraid I wouldn't want what she wanted. Maybe she was afraid I'd cut and run if she told me that what she really wanted was for us to be together, her and me and the baby, whatever it took."

"Was that what you wanted?" his therapist asks quietly.

"I wanted to want it," he says. "I could have learned. I had no idea what I was doing. I'd wasted my first chance at life. I didn't want to waste my second."

"What does that mean to you, to waste your life?" his therapist asks.

He spreads his hands in helpless ignorance. "Once it meant not finding the truth. Then it meant not being with her. Then it was about not finding the answers that would make it safe for us to be together with our son. Then it was trying to avert the end of the world. Now I don't know."

"Those are heavy burdens to carry," his therapist says in her gentlest, most soothing voice.

He sighs.

"Fox, if you think it would help, I could invite Dana in to start a conversation," his therapist says.

"No," he says immediately, the word snapping out of him. He can't imagine talking to Scully about all of this in front of someone else. It's taken months for him to be comfortable in therapy; she has more practice, but the things that have happened to them, between them, are too private to reveal. They'll talk - he can feel the day approaching - but they'll talk only to each other. 

His therapist looks disappointed. "I respect your boundaries," she says, "but it will be easier for me to help you facilitate your own healing if you're open with me."

There is no way he can sit in this office and call Scully "Dana", or hear her call him "Fox". They can't pretend they're not the people they are, or that the last twenty years have been something they can resolve with a conversation. Their past is like those trees in the old growth forests in Washington, rings and rings of old hurts pressed around the people they used to be. He is terrified of unleashing some horror that will suck the life out of them. How many years did they whisper into the bare inch of space between their faces, afraid of being overheard? How many years did they make a universe of two, because there was darkness all around them? No telescope, no outside observer can calculate the laws that govern them, the strange gravity of grief and love and loss and loneliness that warps the fabric of their relationship. Therapy makes the past easier to bear, but it does not erase it.

"It's not you," he says. "I can't explain." 

His therapist looks at him with careful skepticism, but he's immune to even the precise arch of Scully's eyebrow, and no lesser expression of disbelief can sway him. He'll add his therapist to the list of people who have decided he's spouting impossibilities. It's a long list. It's filled file cabinets. It's kindled fires. 

There he goes again, he thinks. Mulder the martyr. He has kept score in his mind for too many years, cataloguing the wrongs done against him. No wonder Scully left him. No wonder he tried to flee himself. He's no better than his father, measuring out his vengeance and imagining the bitter doses are medicine. When she looks at him, she probably sees him marking tallies of each perceived slight. He would be lying if he said there was a blank slate between them. With his few words on Mother's Day, he tried to wipe out the bold block print of his son's name, but the letters are still visible. The debt is not redeemed. 

_Psychologist, heal thyself._ His physician doesn't want the job anymore. He can't blame her. He's always been the kind of patient who just ripped off the bandages and kept bleeding and bleeding and bleeding.

The end of days was scheduled for 2012. They sat together, breathless, waiting, a little bit drunk just in case. And nothing happened. The world didn't end. She kissed him, pulling him down, and they stripped off each other's clothes and celebrated the way another disaster had skimmed past them. But maybe it didn't. Maybe the world he knew quietly died in the moments between the ticks of the clock, while they were occupied with the way heat rose everywhere they touched. He has been living in the ghost of a world he thought would endure forever. No wonder everything surprises him. He has been waiting for the sky to fall, not realizing it lay under his feet. He can look around now, thanks to the interventions of his therapist. He can see his life for what it is, a shadow just like the ones he chased. Maybe he can build a new world that isn't populated with men with no names or enemies with no substance. The work will be back-breaking, sweat-stinging; he'll go to bed with sore muscles and wake up with calluses. But he'll sleep at night, exhausted from an honest effort, and at least it's a new idea, not the ouroboros consuming itself he's lived for so long. 

All it takes is breaking the ground.

\+ + + + 

He calls Scully when he gets home. She doesn't answer. He isn't surprised. She engages on her terms or not at all, because it's all she can do without dashing her heart to bits on the wreckage of what they had. A physical once a year. A desperate fuck or a tender one, fine, but only on her schedule. 

"Scully, it's me," he says, and he knows that's enough to get his message across. She can read his cues in any language. But things have changed. Their survival these days isn't based on their ability to speak in code. In the name of personal growth, he needs to verbalize more than the bare minimum. He needs, as his therapist would say, to facilitate conversation, and the only way to do that is by using the words he's avoided for so long. He takes a deep breath, taps his fingers, feels his heart beating strongly in his chest.

"We need to talk."


	6. Conversation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I've had this conversation with you twenty different ways in my head, and I can't have it anymore."

Three weeks later she opens the door and walks in. She's got her keys in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. She's dressed for work in heels and a suit, but her hair is pulled back messily and her face is flushed.

"I need a drink," she says, brushing past him on her way to the kitchen.

"It's nine in the morning," he says, shuffling after her in the sweatpants he put on after his shower. His days have routine now outside of the pills he swallows. He gets up, he works out. He waits for the Bureau to call him. He works on his book. Now there's Hurricane Scully blowing through his living room, ruffling the couple of papers he left out on top of his laptop for special attention and reducing his plans to rubble. Somehow he doesn't mind. 

"I don't give a damn what time it is, Mulder," comes her voice, punctuated by the clatter of cabinets. The tile is cool under his bare feet. He wraps his hands around the steaming cup of coffee in his hands and watches her almost rip the cap off the bottle. 

"I just called in sick to work," she declares, tipping a measure of whiskey into a mug and topping it off with coffee. She sniffs his milk before she adds a splash. It's out of habit, he understands, and lets it go. The food in the fridge is all fresh now, but she wouldn't know that. She hasn't lived here for a long time. She puts the milk away and glares at him with blowtorch-blue eyes.

"You don't do that very often," he says. 

"No, Mulder, I don't," she says. "Unless I'm in quarantine or dying, or previously, unless I was making some kind of excuse to chase down your sorry ass in whatever state you'd ended up in."

"Are you okay?" he asks, a sliver of ice in his heart at her mention of her health.

"I'm fine," she says. "I am actually, literally, medically fine."

"Emotionally?" he offers, as she sips at her coffee and winces, either from the heat or from the concentration of whiskey.

"Emotionally, I'm pissed as hell," she says, her eyes leveled at him like a pair of pistols. "I can't sleep, Mulder, because every night, when I go to bed, all I can hear is you saying that we need to talk. I've had this conversation with you twenty different ways in my head, and I can't have it anymore."

"Hopefully once more," he says, because there are some spots the leopard can't change. She just looks at him and takes another sip of her coffee, baring her teeth a little to spare her lips. He tips his head toward the living room and she sweeps out and sits down on the couch, kicking off her shoes. Almost as soon as she sits down she's up again, pacing the room. He leans against the doorjamb and takes a swallow of coffee. He has a feeling he'll want whiskey in his before too long, and he isn't even psychic anymore.

"Where should we start?" he asks.

"Did you ever even want a baby?" she bursts out. "Or did you just want me to be happy?"

He sets his mug down very carefully. "At the very beginning, huh. Don't pull your punches on my account, Scully."

"You never wanted a house and a dog," she says. "You never wanted a family. When I asked you to be my donor, you took days to decide."

"It was a big decision," he says. "It was never - Scully, I promise you, never for a second - that I didn't want to."

"You said you didn't want it to come between us," she says. Her cheeks are bright pink; her eyes are bright too, and that terrifies him. It still wounds him every time he sees her cry. He has wrapped her in his arms to soothe away the thoughts of monsters and funerals. Right now, he's not even sure she'd let him touch her. They have to have this out, like lancing an abscess. In the meantime, it's going to hurt like hell.

"Think about my family," he says softly. "I told myself I'd never have children. I'd convinced myself I'd never want them. Nobody else needed to inherit what I'd gotten. I wanted to say yes the second you asked me. I wanted all of that for us. But how could I?"

"You and I are not your parents," she says, and it's so throaty it's almost a rough whisper. "You and I are not other people."

"I did want you to be happy," he says. "I wanted both of us to be happy. Whatever that meant. I'm sorry it hurt you that I made you wait. I'm sorry it hurt you that I had your ova and didn't tell you. I thought I was protecting you."

"I can protect myself," she says, and now there are definitely tears quivering on the rims of her eyelids. 

"You always could," he agrees. 

She looks away, glancing down at her coffee as if she's forgotten all about it. She picks up the mug and brings it to her lips. Her fingers are trembling, just a little. 

"What I wanted scared me," he says softly. "I was selfish. I wanted you all to myself. I wanted it to be you and me the way it always had been, and I also wanted all the rest of it. My mind was reeling, Scully. I wanted the apartment and the Bureau and the X-Files and I wanted the house and the dog and the kid and a life we could make together, but I knew those things were mutually exclusive."

"I wanted that too," she whispers. "All of it."

"How could we bring a child into that situation?" he asks. "How could we ask each other to give up the work that had made us who we were? But, god, Scully, I wanted it so bad. I laid awake at night wanting it."

"I'm sorry," she says. 

He shakes his head and drinks his coffee. She drinks hers too, looking at him over the rim of her mug. Her toes are pale and distinct in the pile of the rug. They look like pearls.

"You know what the worst part was, for me?" he asks, trying to make his voice conversational. "The worst part was that you didn't ask me to be with you. You didn't ask me to make a life together. You only asked for my donation."

"Mulder," she says, and he knows, but he's going to make her say it. He waits, takes another swallow of coffee, scuffs his foot over the floor. She sighs. "There's a literary device where referring to a part represents the whole of something."

"Synecdoche," he says.

"I thought you knew," she says. "What I wanted."

"How could I?" he asks. "We had never even kissed. _Apis interruptus_."

The look she gives him could wither an old growth oak. It's a look he knows so well he sees it in his dreams, and all at once he's swept by a wave of nostalgia for the days when things were simple: they searched for his sister and they searched for the truth about Scully's abductors as they crisscrossed the country looking for anomalies. Something about it had been so pure. They had been bound up in each other and their quest and their faith in each other was absolute. Maybe they have been remaking themselves, but they don't have to start from nothing. They have a foundation. It's still there, somewhere under the ashes of the latest conflagration.

"You knew I had feelings about you," she says. "You've always had a remarkable intuition."

"I had a hunch," he says. "But you can't build a life on a hunch."

"You could," she says. "If anybody could."

"I love you," he says. "I've loved you almost half my life now, so I better be able to say it. I love you so much it makes me stupid."

She smiles, just barely. "Is that what it is?"

"That and about a hundred other factors," he says. "Your turn."

"I'm not sure what you want me to say," she demurs, and sips at her coffee.

"Tell me about these feelings you have for me," he says. "Or had."

She holds her coffee close to her mouth but doesn't drink. "Have."

"Present tense," he murmurs. "I like that."

"There are a lot of feelings, Mulder," she says, and there's that quirk to her lips, even if it's wearier than he likes to see it.

"And?" he prompts.

She sighs. "Irritation. Anger. Sadness. Frustration."

"It's like the worst lottery scratch ticket in history," he says. His heart gives a little more, like a sagging wood floor. Self-doubt nibbles at him like termites. He sets down his mug.

"Of course I love you," she says, gazing at him steadily. "But it's not always enough, Mulder. I'm not always enough for you."

"You are," he says, and he has never sworn an oath with more fervor.

"I'm not," she says, and this time the tears are in her voice, though she restrains them. She swallows some coffee. "If I were enough, you wouldn't have nearly torn yourself to pieces when you came back."

"I'm in therapy for that," he offers. "It helps." 

"I saw your prescription in your file," she says. "I'm glad. But if I were enough, you wouldn't have gone with Diana every chance you got."

"That was different," he says automatically, but he knows it wasn't. He remembers his dream, the last temptation of Fox Mulder. At the time, it had made perfect sense that Diana was waiting for him. The Cancer Man, his father, would never have brought Scully to his suburban haven. Scully never would have gone willingly. And Scully, he had thought, had made it clear that all she needed from him could be caught in a specimen cup. He hadn't known he had a choice. 

"I'm sorry," he tells her. "I thought you didn't want me. And she came to me when I was sick, after the artifact. She cared for me."

"Mulder, the reason I wasn't there is that I was out working our case," she says. "Every time you went with her, I was working our case. I can't be sure that if she were alive today, you wouldn't leave me if she showed up with something interesting to bait you away."

"I don't know what to tell you, Scully," he says. "It wouldn't be like that."

"And isn't it lucky we have no way of testing your hypothesis?" she mumbles into her coffee. 

He crosses the room to her and takes her mug gently to set it on the table. Her hands fit between his, small and cool. "Trust me," he says. "That's all I have. But I'd marry you today if you'd say yes, and you know it."

"I'm not sure I'm the marrying type," she says, and the frost is back in her eyes. She draws her hands gently out of his. "I'm not sure you are either. A few words don't change who people are, Mulder."

The Gunmen must have told her. His marriage to Diana had lasted months, not even half a year, before she had gone to Europe. He'd sold his ring. Their divorce had been almost easier than the wedding. He added it to the list of things they hadn't talked about. He hadn't told her before because it seemed irrelevant; he hadn't told her after because she was wounded enough already. Today was the day for it, apparently; there were decades of grievances to air.

"We got married," he says. "We were young. We were stupid. It didn't work out. I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I was ashamed, maybe, or I don't know, I didn't want you to think anyone else compared to you, because nobody did. Not Diana, not anybody. I'm sorry I made you feel like you mattered less than you did."

"If it were going to work, I would have to know," she says, and her voice is uneven. "I would have to know you wouldn't leave."

"I wouldn't," he says. 

"You always do," she says sadly. "Mulder, I needed you, and you weren't there."

His heart creaks again. "Scully," he begins, but she cuts him off with a shake of her head. 

"I know why you left," she says. "I know you thought it was for the best. But we were lost without you, Mulder. William and I. We needed you. And I couldn't even call you." Her voice hitches. "I had Spender, of all people, but I didn't have you."

"I wanted you both to be safe," he says helplessly.

"I know," she says. "I know. But you knew by then I wanted you. You knew I needed you. And we weren't enough. You leaving didn't stop us being in danger. You must have known it wouldn't change things."

"I hoped," he says.

"Hope isn't always enough either," she says. 

"I know that," he says. "But sometimes it is."

"When?" The word is fragile, hanging in the air between them.

"Now," he says. "Look. I'm changing. I'm better. Well," he corrects, "I'm in the process of getting better."

"For me?" she asks.

"For me," he says. "I won't put that pressure on you. If all you want to be is my doctor, then be my doctor, but I'm telling you things are different."

She shakes her head, slowly and sadly. "I want to believe that, Mulder."

"Trust me, Scully," he says.

"I've always trusted you," she says. "And look where it's gotten us."

He's quiet for a moment.

"Mulder, you made the same promises in Virginia," she reminds him, crossing her arms. "And the darkness followed us anyway."

"We didn't say these things," he says. "We had to have this conversation before anything could really change. Didn't we." It isn't a question. "We had to talk about William, or we would never be able to move on with our lives the way we were supposed to. We could never be anyone but the people we were then."

She turns her head away and reaches down for her mug, draining the rest of her coffee. She sets the mug down again with finality and looks at him. The whiskey has given her dreamy eyes and a deeper flush to her cheeks. She looks utterly kissable. He knows better than to touch her.

"I was angry with you," he says. "For giving him away. For giving up. I just needed you to hold on a little longer."

"I was angry with you for leaving," she says. "You weren't there for the most difficult decision of my life. I needed you."

"I'm sorry," he says, because there's nothing else to say. At least the words don't sound hollow. 

"I'm sorry too," she says, but she says it like her heart is breaking.

"I'm sure you made the right choice," he says. 

"At least one of us is," she murmurs. 

He opens his arms, tentatively, and she steps into them, pressing her face against him. He holds her close and feels her arms lock around his back. Her tears are hot against his skin; they trickle down his belly to soak into the waistband of his sweatpants. He kisses the top of her head and lets her cry.

"I just wish I knew he was okay," she whispers, her lips brushing his chest. 

"Me too," he says. "Scully, I know I left, but it didn't mean I didn't love him. It didn't mean I didn't love you. I was scared. It was all I knew to do."

She cries for a few minutes. His throat aches and his eyes sting, but only a few tears actually roll down his cheeks. He mostly feels an emptiness in the space between his ribs, except for the way his heart thuds. God, he's missed the way her hair smells. It's the easiest thing in the world to tip her face up and gaze into her eyes. She stares up at him, sniffling, and he leans down to kiss her. She kisses him back, tender at first and then harder, as if she's punishing him, and he takes every moment of it. 

"My therapist thinks that sleeping together is setting back my recovery," he says when she releases him. "Potentially."

"Your therapist can go to hell," she says fiercely. "In this regard, anyway."

She leads him up the stairs to the bedroom and undoes her buttons one at a time as he watches. It's easy enough to shuck off his sweatpants. She pushes him onto the bed and fucks him like they're still fighting, and he gives back in kind. It's rough, it's raw, and it's exactly what he needed, a microcosm of their greater debate. At least in bed nobody's ever fatally wrong and everybody ends up satisfied. Afterward, they sleep, and when he wakes up, she's still there.

They lie in bed most of the morning, not saying much, not touching much, just watching each other until the flint and spark of their eyes meeting becomes too much, and they pull each other close. We made a baby this way once, he thinks, and wonders if they could do it again. She would say that she's too old, but he believes in miracles. So far, in his experience, it has never been too late to try again, to fail again better. There are moments that she looks at him and he is afraid this is the last time, but there are moments when he looks at her and dares to hope. She always kisses him then, so close he can't see her eyes.

Eventually they're too hungry to linger any longer. She dresses carefully as he drags on his pants again and clomps downstairs to make omelettes and toast. On a shelf he never uses, she finds an album that Maggie made full of William's baby pictures. They sit on the couch together, knees touching, and she shows him all the milestones he missed.

"I can't believe we never did this before," he says.

"You never asked," she tells him. 

The silence fills the room, but there's a little less ache in it now. 

"I should have," he says.

"At least you're asking now," she tells him. 

She closes the book and her hand absentmindedly caresses the cover, as if she can touch the infant in the pictures. "I wonder what he looks like now."

"I hope he has your nose," he teases.

"I hope he has your eyes," she says, and smiles a little. 

"Are you coming home?" he asks.

"I don't know," she tells him. "I need time, Mulder."

"You've had time," he says, and it sounds pathetic to his own ears.

"I need more," she says, her face grave. "If I can, I will. That has to be enough for you."

"If," he says hollowly. Not when. 

"If," she agrees. "If I can be sure we won't fall into the same old cycle. Two steps forward, three steps back."

"That's how I feel," he says. "That's what I want."

She brushes his jaw with her fingertips. "Not today," she says. "But maybe. If that isn't good enough, then tell me now."

He catches her fingers and kisses them. "You're my constant," he says. "That hasn't changed."

She looks into his eyes. "I can't make you a whole person. And I can't see in the dark."

"I know," he says. 

"I know where we live," she tells him. "If. But one fight doesn't solve this." Her gesture encompasses twenty years of ditching, of unanswered calls, of quiet betrayals, of cheap motel rooms when they were on the run, of parents lost and children stolen. "I need time."

He nods. It's all he can manage. 

She stands and kisses his forehead, slips on her shoes, and leaves. He goes into the kitchen and pours a splash of whiskey into a glass, then caps the bottle and puts it away in the cabinet. It stings going down, but there's a sweetness to the burn.


	7. Motion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the road, they hadn't had to hide any part of themselves from each other.

He gets up in the morning, tugs on shorts and a t-shirt, brushes his teeth, swallows his meds with a mouthful of coffee, and laces up his running shoes. He straps his phone to his arm but doesn't pick up his headphones. There's enough noise in his head without the clamor of classic rock for company. His body doesn't move the same way it did at thirty or even forty, but there is still a comfort in the firm, regular contact of his feet on the pavement or the dirt. It half-hypnotizes him. The world spools past; incognito in his sweaty gear, he slides through a crowd of tourists and barely provokes a flicker of interest. 

In a way he misses being on the lam. There was a purity to their existence after the trial. There was no pretense about them, no attempt at domestic bliss, no groceries to buy. They were Mulder and Scully, no titles, no first names, honed down to their essence, justified in their foxhole mentality. For years, they had lived perpendicular to ordinary lives, testing each step before they shifted their weight in case they were swallowed up. No one else had ever seemed to notice how treacherous the ground was. Then every new town might be a trap, every new face an enemy, and no one told them they were mistaken or paranoid. Each stop was a temporary shelter. They shrugged in and out of identities according to their soldiers' instincts. They pretended to be married or not as the whim took them, without discussing the idea for themselves. They changed the color of their hair and the timbre of their accents. He ran through deserts and forests, returning to that week's hotel room to shower. They'd kept their guns loaded and their bags packed.

And the sex had been fantastic. He tried to redirect his thoughts; the shorts he ran in weren't confining enough. But after ten years of longing looks and breathless conversations and stolen moments, they had finally been able to enjoy their fill of each other. There had been desperate sex, and angry sex, and slow gentle tender sex. They had kissed their way up and down each other's bodies in hotels, motels, tents, and cars. They had laughed in each other's arms. They had wept. They had surprised each other, somehow, even after years.

On the road, they hadn't had to hide any part of themselves from each other. He'd known what brand of tampons she used and how often she'd need to restock. He'd known the way it sounded when she spit in the sink after brushing her teeth. He'd known what foods would upset her stomach, and what she looked like in jeans and a t-shirt, standing in the fluorescent glare of the laundromat, waiting for their clothes to dry. Her hair had always smelled like fabric softener afterward. He'd buried his face in it and breathed her in.

He reaches the halfway point of his usual route and doesn't turn back. His mind is too cluttered to head home yet. He has lived a life that necessitated forward momentum: he had to get out of his house, he had to chase the truth, he had to flee the consequences, he had to avert the armageddon. Scully's a physicist; she understands that his body at rest will never stay at rest, in contradiction to the rest of the universe. 

"You're a perpetual motion machine," she'd said once, exasperated.

He'd turned it into an innuendo. She'd quirked a wry eyebrow and let him put his hand up her shirt. They'd fallen onto the bed together, leaving the fight for another day. And then one day there were too many accumulated fights, and neither of them could open their mouths without a stale unspoken word falling out. He'd coaxed her to run with him. They'd outpaced their frustration, sweated out their anger. They'd passed a water bottle from hand to hand and said nothing. She'd reached out and steadied herself against his shoulder as she stretched, and he had turned to kiss her fingers, licking the salt of her sweat off his lips.

"We can't do this forever," she'd said in the shower as he lifted the weight of her hair off her shoulders to soap her back.

"I know," he'd said. 

"I can't do this forever," she'd clarified, her voice sounding odd in the cramped space.

"I know," he'd said.

They'd started looking for houses the next day. The one they settled on was unremarkable, but there had been enough of the blood money he'd had left to buy it and furnish it. He had teased her once about picking out china patterns, but their taste in decor was only moderately compatible. Mulder tended toward stern antiques; Scully liked overstuffed sofas. But they'd been happy there, after a fashion, for a while. It had felt more like a home than anywhere he'd lived since Samantha. He'd dreamed once that he and William were playing catch in the yard on a summer night while Scully looked on and teased him about the night he'd taught her to swing a bat. 

He has some of that furniture now. He still sleeps in their bed and eats at their table, now that neither of them are heaped with cuttings and books. Those were the things he understood made a home, and so he'd packed them into a truck as some kind of shorthand when they'd gotten the new place for their prodigal return. They left most of the rest of it behind when they sold the unremarkable house, called it semi-furnished, ditched the fridge and the rest of the appliances. They'd built a fire in the driveway using most of his newspaper clippings for kindling on their last night in Goochland County. She'd sat between his knees on the porch steps and leaned back against him and they'd drunk wine and he'd felt no fear at all, watching the flames lick at the lowering sky. It had been perfect, in that bittersweet way that has characterized most of his existence since adolescence. They had made a light that drove away the darkness and left them a radius of peace, though the coyotes still yipped in the woods.

Fires burn out, eventually, and the dark closes in. He can only hope there is still some ember in the ashes that can be revived. If anyone has the power to breathe life back into something, it's probably Scully.

He is soaked with sweat. He drops to a walk and pulls up the tail of his shirt to wipe his face. He'll feel this tomorrow, he knows, but sometimes it's necessary. He needed to think about the way she told him to go, but wanted him to stay, and the way he went, only half-unwilling. He ought to have known better at the time; he doubts she will ever tell him she needs him, no matter how many times she says she loves him. But there were no good choices, no right choices, and they both know it now the way they knew it then. If the path at their feet has ever been illuminated, it has only been by the flashlights they carried. The shadows shift and loom even in hindsight. 

This is the reason Scully goes to confession, he thinks, to feel the sting of his sins scrubbed away first and the aching emptiness later where he held his secrets close to his heart. A breeze pushes his hair back and kisses his forehead. He walks for a moment to catch his breath and stretch, and then picks up the pace, turning toward home. His mind turns over as smoothly as his feet. The weight that held him down for so long feels like a dim memory. He can bear it now. He has the strength to stand on his own two feet, not propped up by Scully or his work or his accumulated misery.

Let there be light.

He knows that he and Scully have not righted the wrongs they have done each other, but the air feels clearer without the fog of things unsaid. Sometimes the act of saying a thing allows it to be real, allows it to be felt. He needed that as much as any other intervention, medical or emotional. His memory, once so reliable, has been tampered with over the years, but he always trusts Scully's vision of the world, and in her eyes, they have redeemed each other in some small measure. He breathes easier now. 

When he gets home, there's a message from Skinner. He didn't even feel the phone buzz.

"Agent Mulder," Skinner says in his gruff way, slightly tinny from the way Mulder's holding the phone away from his sweaty ear, "I'd like to see you in my office tomorrow morning. 9 sharp. Don't be late, agent."


	8. Committee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first thing he wants to do is call her.

The first thing he wants to do is call her. Too many years of instinct at work, and he's already got his phone in his hand. But better to see her, he thinks. They have not solved anything between them, or righted the wrongs they have done each other. The air is clear enough that he can see she needs time and space. In a way, she fears him, and he doesn't blame her: he knows his dark gravity of his past has warped her life. Their orbit is steady now. As long as he can see the light in her eyes on a dark night, he will endure. 

Still strung out on endorphins, still thinking about the purity and misery of life in a hundred anonymous hotel rooms, he jots down a few words on a scrap of paper:

In the car we were  
together:  
our love our fear our   
hearts beating  
like weary wings, our flight  
swift, arrowing away  
from the life we had known  
On the road we were only  
ourselves  
only  
with each other

They come out in fragments and he leaves them that way. His sweat drips onto the paper; the ink blurs like clouds. He hasn't written poetry in decades. Since England, possibly; he's sure he tried to impress Phoebe with a line or two of verse, and probably failed, and got laid anyway. He will probably never show this to Scully, like the baby clothes he bought for William and tucked away into a box marked "Mulder - papers - college", but at least he has said it in some way. 

He spends the whole restless day cleaning the house. It's tidier than it's ever been, like his apartment after the sudden mysterious acquisition of the waterbed. It's a place that he thinks Scully could see herself in again, could make herself a space in. He thinks of their old apartments and wonders how they managed for so long to keep living in the shelters they had built for themselves over the stains of old blood and the stench of fear. This place could be a home. He can see, with everything put away, the way he was crowding her out. He put up walls of books and papers between them. He built himself a nest like Tooms. With his notes confined to his study, the house is full of sunlight. Dust motes sparkle in the air like snowflakes as he vacuums. He opens the windows and lets the breeze waft in.

He sleeps well, and that surprises him, but the morning seems so full of possibility. The bed feels empty without her, but it's an anticipatory lack, not a hollow. He pours himself coffee and makes an English muffin before getting into the shower. The crossword puzzle seems easy. It feels like an omen.

The plastic crinkles as he peels the dry cleaner's bag away from his suit. It's newer, the wool still flawless when he brushes his palm over it. His old suits don't look right, even though they've been altered. There are almost invisible lines that show how he's changed, which seems like too apt a metaphor. The tailor assured him they'll fade as he wears the suits again, but he still sees the scars where the scissors snipped. Those suits were his armor and shield and he knows every seam. The new suit has no history. He can be a new man in this suit. 

He buttons his shirt and his pants, kicking the crease of his hems over his shined shoes. He shrugs into the new jacket and looks into the mirror. Fox Mulder looks back at him, remade. Age has made him broader here and there, and the weights he lifted trying to sweat Scully out of his blood have thickened his arms. His new shirts are cut slimmer than his old ones. They show the shape of his body more, but he doesn't mind. He has a heft now that he never had in his thirties, and it gives him some kind of authority. He hasn't had his ass kicked in a long time.

He still drives the route downtown like an expert, though he's only made the trip from the new place a few times. He takes his visitor badge with good grace this time, moderately assured of having his own credentials again one day. He isn't making some kind of pilgrimage to Scully's office in hopes of receiving her blessing today. He's setting the scene for his own redemption. 

His feet know the way, carrying him through the halls and into the elevator. Skinner is as gruff as ever, glowering over the polished wood of his desk. "Agent Mulder. Thank you for coming in today."

"It's my pleasure, sir," Mulder says in his best company voice. Last time he saw Skinner, they were both drunk as hell, Mulder out of his mind after Scully left, Skinner downing whiskey in quiet solidarity. 

"There's your chance, Walter," Mulder slurred.

"I wouldn't do that to either of you," Skinner told him. He hadn't even flinched. Mulder respected him for that. Skinner had always stood his ground, even when he wasn't certain of his footing. "There are choices people shouldn't have to make."

Mulder dragged his fingertip through the pool of condensation his glass had left. "I've seen the way you look at her."

"Can you blame me?" Skinner asked softly, not saying a word about professionalism or the way Mulder had always looked at her or the reasons why she'd left and Mulder was grateful.

"No," he said. "I can't blame you."

Skinner bought him one more round and then called them both cabs. Mulder thought that at least he had managed to say thank you, as if that covered the last twenty years of saving their asses and staring down their united front of blank faces by way of justification. He is sure Skinner endured the hangover as stoically as he'd endured all the rest of it. But now here they are, back in the office where Mulder sat so often with Scully that he thinks he sees her out of the corner of his eye.

There are other people in the room, five of them, sitting quietly in the corner. Mulder doesn't recognize any of them, which is nice in a way. If Ritter or Colton had been promoted, well, they both have open accounts he'd like to settle, a little equity for blood and sweat shed in pursuit of justice. 

"Agent Mulder, as you are aware, we've been discussing your possible reinstatement to active duty," Skinner says, organizing the files on his desk in that meticulous way he has when he's thinking hard. "Your extensive sabbatical requires that we initiate certain procedures."

Mulder tries not to smirk. Sabbatical is an optimistic euphemism for his banishment and the charges of treason, and more recently for his convalescence from the long-delayed reaction to his abduction and death. He supposes it's technically accurate, given the promises made in the deal about the case of the psychic priest: come home, all is forgiven. Their records expunged, the charges dropped, their titles reinstated if they choose. Scully had not argued much; she had always walked as if she wore her badge, stern and official. She couldn't take it off, though he had enjoyed watching her try, those months on the road, to be someone new, a woman who didn't case the corners of every room or touch the small of her back looking for her gun in a tense situation.

"Agent Mulder," Skinner says, "would you please summarize your work on the X-Files for those who may be less familiar with your history?"

Mulder restrains a sigh. Skinner gives him the ghost of a Look, and it's just like every meeting Mulder has endured, trying to justify his existence to the skeptical higher ups. "I originally became interested in the X-Files as a means of investigating my sister's abduction, which I believed at the time was due to paranormal or extraterrestrial forces. The work interested me and I began to pursue it for its own sake. The nature of the cases necessitated a certain investigative method and a particular liberty for agents assigned to the division. Bureau administration had some difficulty accepting that non-conventional methodology despite its success. Agent Scully was assigned to the X-Files division because administration assumed that her scientific background would enable her to debunk the work, allowing the division to be shut down. However, her integrity and her strict methodology led instead to our having the highest solve rate in the Bureau, both on our own cases and those on which we were requested to consult. We were not always able to scientifically explain those results, but our effectiveness was undeniable. Despite this, our superior experienced pressure to rein in our efforts and close the division. We believe this was a result of the information we uncovered about a conspiracy that extended to the highest levels of the government, a conspiracy intended to mislead the American people about the existence of extraterrestrial life and the group's collaboration with these beings,as well as their attempts to oppose the alien colonization project via the creation of hybridized humans or super soldiers."

He is aware of how quiet the room is as he speaks, only the rustle of papers in the corner. If Scully were here, she would be telegraphing quiet sturdy defiance at their evaluators and resignment at him. They will always sound foolish, to skeptical ears. They will always sound as if they have wasted their lives chasing lights in the sky. Maybe they have. But look what they've seen, in the dark hours of the night. And no one is questioning that, only him.

"And did you find your sister?" Skinner asks, and for a second, Mulder is furious with him. As if Skinner doesn't remember California, young girls disappearing, a twisted Santa Claus, Mulder's mother's anguish, Scully defiant and protective at his apartment door too early to have slept in her own bed, Samantha's loopy careful handwriting on the pages of her diary. He swallows against the whiskey burn of grief and anger. Skinner is doing his job, trying to make them all look conventionally competent, saving what's left of Mulder's career from the wreckage of the basement office.

"I believe I did, sir," Mulder says. "Though her disappearance was not the result of extraterrestrial intervention, it was a consequence of that same government conspiracy which Agent Scully and I had uncovered. She had been kidnapped by men who were deeply involved in the project."

"Can you discuss what happened in Bellefleur, Oregon in May 2000?" Skinner asks, and there is a glint of compassion behind his glasses.

"I was abducted," Mulder says, and leaves it at that.

"By aliens?" asks one of the observers. Mulder hasn't seen her before; she has dark skin and hair and eyes, with a lilt to her voice that suggests Afro-Caribbean heritage. Her suit is elegant and her composure reminds him of Scully's, unreadable to the wrong eyes. She reminds him of his therapist, but with more hints of sharpness in the way she watches.

"By unknown parties or forces which may have been extraterrestrial in nature but which have never been substantiated as such," Mulder hedges. "No definitive evidence was recovered from the scene by either Agent Scully or Assistant Director Skinner. I was eventually returned by my abductors with no explanation for either my release or my comatose state of near death, or for my subsequent and apparently spontaneous revival." 

"After your recovery from this mysterious illness, you continued your work on the X-Files with an Agent Doggett," says the woman.

"Yes," Mulder says. "Agent Scully had gone on maternity leave and the division was inadequately staffed to handle the ongoing investigation into the conspiracy that seemed to have had a hand in my abduction."

"And Agent Scully's maternity leave was due to the fact that she was pregnant with a child you had fathered, correct?" she asks.

"To the best of my knowledge, yes," Mulder says, trying to keep his tone even. "The circumstances surrounding her pregnancy were complicated and the child's parentage was uncertain, but we both consider him our son." He thinks about correcting himself, but he cannot refer to his son in the past tense. Wherever William might be, thriving or interred, he is still their son.

"You and Agent Scully had become romantically involved by this point?" his inquisitor continues.

"Yes," Mulder says, and leaves it at that. The rest of it belongs only to him and to Scully, the nights of frustration and longing and the sweet moments of relief.

"And given that this relationship violated Bureau policy, you understood that this jeopardized your professional relationship and the future of the X-Files," she says.

Mulder says nothing.

"For the record," Skinner breaks in, "they had disclosed the nature of their relationship to me and I found it had no impact on their professionalism or the caliber of their work."

Disclosed is a strong word, Mulder thinks, flashing back again to Scully's rumpled shirt and tousled hair as she faced down Skinner, but he is grateful for the intervention.

"Is it your intention to return to the X-Files if reinstated?" the woman asks, her pen poised.

"Not at this time," Mulder says. "Although there is still work to be done on cases that fall outside the Bureau's usual scope, I feel that I've put in my time and gotten the answers I sought. I would be happy to consult on an X-File-type case if necessary, but my preference would be to return to profiling. I got killed less often when I was assigned to that division."

"An important concern," she agrees with a slight smile. "Especially as a parent."

"Agent Scully and I no longer have custody of our son," he says, a pang stinging through his chest at the thought of his son, a teenage stranger now, flesh of his flesh living some other life than William Scully's, or so they pray. "We believed his life was in danger due to those who opposed our work, and that giving him up for adoption was the best way to ensure his safety."

"The charges of treason that were forgiven," the woman says, as they as flip a page in their files. "Can you explain the circumstances under which you were accused?"

"I was thought to have been involved in the death of an individual whom I suspected of being a product of a government program intended to genetically engineer a stronger, faster strain of humanity who might serve as invincible super soldiers," Mulder says. "Those charges were dropped."

"Due to your cooperation on another investigation seven years ago," she clarifies.

"I can't speak to the motivations of the court or the justice system," Mulder hedges. "But the charges were dropped."

Skinner nods almost imperceptibly.

"And since then, Agent Mulder," he says, "you have been on an extended leave of absence from active duty due to medical reasons?"

"The Bureau had some understandable concerns about how my experiences might have contributed to my diagnosis of PTSD," Mulder tells her. "My absence was by choice. Neither Agent Scully or I wanted to return to the Bureau immediately. We had both found other work that allowed us to recuperate. My engagement has been limited to the occasional consultation when the usual methods failed to yield results."

"Your therapist is pleased with your progress," Skinner says, shuffling through his papers. "She's recommended that you be allowed to return to active duty if you so choose."

"Contingent on the approval of this panel," says the woman.

"Of course," Skinner says. "If reinstated, you would need to undergo re-evaluation for psychological fitness, competence with firearms, the usual checklist. Additionally, we could offer no guarantee that you would receive the assignment you request."

"Of course," Mulder parrots. 

"Are you prepared to accept these conditions?" Skinner asks, his voice as level as his eyes.

"I am, sir," Mulder says, equally even.

"We'll contact you to let you know our decision," Skinner says. "I imagine you'll hear from me by this evening."

"Thank you, sir," Mulder says, getting up. After all these years, he knows when he's dismissed. He nods slightly to the committee in the corner. Skinner twitches his lips in silent reassurance, and Mulder nods again and closes the door behind himself. Kimberly smiles at him.

"Back to work, Agent Mulder?" she asks, as if she hasn't given him the death glare a hundred times. They're all older and wiser now. Maybe they've forgiven and forgotten.

"We'll see," he says.

"It's been good to see Agent Scully around the building again," Kimberly tells him. "I hope it goes well."

"Thank you," he says sincerely, and lets his feet carry him out of the building again. He drives home in a reverie, catching himself almost making the turn to go to Quantico, but he straightens the car out in time. Not yet. There will be world enough and time, he thinks, whatever happens, for him to meet Scully on their common ground.


	9. Restoration

Skinner calls, and Mulder only lets it ring once before he answers.

"Sir," he says, just in case.

"Congratulations, Agent Mulder," Skinner says. "Contingent on your recertification, you are once more a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

"Thank you, sir," Mulder says. 

"Cut the sir," Skinner grumbles. "This isn't business hours. We've known each other too damn long. Meet me at nine and I'll let you buy me a drink to celebrate."

"Sounds good, Skinman," Mulder says, because he can't resist. Skinner grunts but lets it go. 

"Are you going to call Scully?" he asks.

Mulder lets out a noisy breath. "Should I?"

"Better she finds out from you," Skinner tells him. "Did something happen?"

There were moments, in bed together, that Mulder thought she might move back in, and there were moments he was afraid she would walk out. He has flung open the windows of his life to let the light in, but there are still shadowy corners in his mind and in his heart, and thoughts that go bump in the night. 

"Nothing happened," he says, and that absolutely isn't true, but he isn't about to explain the rest of it to Skinner. 

"Then call her," Skinner says, and hangs up.

Mulder stares at his phone. She needs time, she said, but surely they're still friends. Surely they can be colleagues again, if not partners. He pulls up his favorites (her, Skinner, his therapist) and taps her name.

He gets her voicemail, which is something of a relief. "Hey, Scully," he says after the beep. "It's me. Uh, just wanted to let you know that Skinner called me tonight and said they're moving me back to active duty, so I guess I might see you around. We're going out for a drink if you want to drop by." She knows the bar. It's their usual. He's picked at the labels of a lot of beer bottles and watched the oak-and-amber light soften the lines of her face. He's distracted enough that he almost tells her he loves her, but he catches himself and hangs up. That isn't time. That isn't space, to remind her of how tightly they bound themselves together.

He and Skinner have a couple of drinks, call each other Walter and Fox, and it's strange, but it's nice. God knows he knows how to compartmentalize, after all those years of quietly loving Scully and working with her too. At least with Skinner it isn't quite the same problem. They see each other off at a reasonable hour and Mulder goes home to his house, their house, and half-expects to see her sitting on the living room couch, working up a look that will pin him to the wall. But the place is empty in a comfortable way. No Scully. No intruders. Nothing has been disturbed. He has nothing to worry about. 

He climbs the stairs to go to bed and doesn't look for her hair or try to catch her scent lingering on the pillow. She isn't there, and that's all right; he's caught up in some moment of faith, listening to a voice singing in his heart. She will come back. They will be okay. They will not be the people they were before, but they will rebuild something new out of the fragments of their younger selves. They'll make new mistakes, have new fights, and he will relish every moment of it the way he never could in his thirties. 

He falls asleep just as he realizes she never called him back. 

\+ + + +

He lets them put him through his paces. The Bureau psychologist reports with amusement that he seems much more stable now than he did the first time around, flipping back and forth between the pages of his inches-thick file of facts and figures. The sum of Fox Mulder, or at least his career, is barely contained by manila. He's a little rusty at the range, but it only takes a few practice sessions before he's remembered how to brace against the way the gun kicks. Now if only he can brace against the way his heart kicks when he thinks of working close to Scully again, he'll be invincible.

He takes the stairs to make the trip last longer, breathing in the familiar scent of old carpet and bad coffee. Mulder is acutely aware of the way his new badge swings and clicks against his suit jacket. There is grey in the hair of the man in the photograph, and there are lines around his eyes, but he recognizes himself, at long last. 

"Welcome back," Skinner says, shaking his hand and offering him a genuine smile in defiance of the business hours rule. 

"Thank you, sir," he says. Skinner would probably be director by now if it weren't for the Mulder-and-Scully-shaped blotches on his record. He hopes Skinner knows that he appreciates that.

The rest of it is déjà vu all over again: training, reading. The heavy books of criminal codes have been phased out, and he misses them. Studying doesn't feel the same without the crackle of paper and the hefty weight of the law in his hands. Frequenting conspiracy message boards turns out to have had some purpose, though. He isn't as out of the loop as he expected to be.

He's assigned to the Behavioral Analysis Unit, familiar old stomping grounds. He was hoping to be in the Hoover Building. Quantico feels like Scully's territory. She's made a name for herself in the Forensic Science Center; he hears admiring murmurs about her when he walks into the break room for coffee. Nobody seems to know him, and that's just fine. Every once in a while he gets a quizzical look, as if someone's trying to remember a song they heard on the radio last week, but that's it. He just comes to work and does his job, and he doesn't take anything home, and it feels good. It feels better than he thought it would. He was worried that the clouds would descend, the peculiar fog of intuition, and that he would find himself subsumed again in the murky minds of murderers. If he descends hand over hand into the darkness each day, he manages to climb out by the time he's reached the parking garage. When he gets home he runs, or cooks, or defrosts something, or reads. He's thinking of getting a dog. The house is still clean. 

He has his own desk, partitioned off from the others a little. Maybe one day he'll have his own office the way that Scully does - she's important enough to have space in both buildings, he thinks. He wonders if anyone uses the old basement office, or if it's been filled up with the paper trails left by busy agents. He likes not being shut away this time around; the bustle of the others is comforting after so long alone in the house, or alone on the road.

He puts the old picture of him and Samantha on his desk, along with a photo of himself and Scully, some crime scene candid he stole from the photographers. It wasn't evidence of anything but their closeness. In it, they are standing together, black coats flapping in a half-remembered breeze. His dark head is bent close to her bright one. She is gesturing at something, and he is listening so intently that he almost feels as if he's eavesdropping on their younger selves. He half expects the Scully in the photograph to turn and glare at him. Those were the days, he thinks wistfully, but there's more fondness in it than ache.

In the center drawer of his desk is another picture of Scully, holding William, and he can almost hear her tuneless lullaby. She would be upset, he thinks, if he kept it on his desk, but this way it's always close. 

The routine is easy to pick up again, even after all his shiftless, drifting purgatory. His life falls into place like a needle into a groove. He works, and it's hard, but it's satisfying. He meets a few of the other agents, who all seem competent enough. Leyla Harrison comes by one day, looking a little more world-weary than the bright-eyed young agent he remembers.

"I heard you were back," she says shyly.

"That's what they say," he tells her, shaking her hand.

"And Agent Scully?" she asks.

"She's back too," Mulder says. "Check forensics. You might catch her between classes."

"And the X-Files?" Harrison asks, a tinge of hope in her voice.

Mulder shakes his head. "No plans to reopen the division at this time," he says.

"That's too bad," Harrison says earnestly. "The two of you did important work."

"I hope that will be true whether or not we're tackling the cases nobody else wants," he says, letting it be a joke. 

"It's good to see you, Agent Mulder," she says.

"You too, Agent Harrison," he tells her. "Thank you for all your support. It means a lot to know that someone was on our side."

She nods, flashing him a heartfelt smile, and clips away in the direction of the lab. He hopes that Scully will be kind to her. He thinks of Antarctica: his memory is a flat white blur of numbness except for the bundle of Scully in his arms. They must have gotten to the Snowcat. They must have made their way back, rumbling over the ice. But the only thing he can see clearly in his mind is Scully's face, bleary and pale, framed by the hood of his coat, her eyes and her nose and her lips red from the cold. The rest of it is a blur until he woke up in the hospital, panicking because he couldn't feel her weight next to him.

It's strange how these things come and go. He flexes his toes inside his shoes to banish the remembered ache. He'd risked frostbite, the doctors told him, and it was a miracle he hadn't lost any fingers or toes to the ice and the damp. But she'd needed his socks. He would have traded all his toes to keep her warm and safe.

He's riddling his way through a profile when a cup of coffee appears on the edge of his desk. He looks up and Scully is there. The tiniest smile plays about her lips. Blink and you'll miss it, he thinks, and wonders if anyone else would even see it. 

"I hear you sent Agent Harrison my way," she says.

He leans back and stretches a little in his chair. "I don't kick puppies, Scully."

"Hmm," she says. "Well. It was nice to see her."

"Your number two fan," he says, picking up the coffee. "Maybe number three if we count Skinner."

She raises an eyebrow at him. "Thank you."

"It's nice to be appreciated," he tells her. "Did you have any trouble finding me?"

"I just followed the trail of sunflower seeds," she says, lifting her coffee to her lips to hide the fact that she's smiling again. He inclines his head in recognition of the point. 

"Were you going to come and see me, if Harrison hadn't come along?" he asks, and it's easier than it would have been before. His existence doesn't hinge upon her answer.

"I was," she says. "It's hard to find the time."

He gazes up at her and raises his own eyebrow in a parody of her expression.

She sighs and drops her eyes to the ground. "It would be easy," she says, lifting her head with that particular gravity, "to fall back into old habits."

"Too easy?" he asks.

"Yes," she says, her eyes on his now. "So I put it off. But I'm here."

"You are," he agrees. They look at each other for a long moment. She looks away first, at the pictures on his desk. 

"Mulder," she says, and just his name contains multitudes: reproach, fondness, wistfulness, irritation. 

"Just somebody I used to work with," he says. "She's my physician and my friend."

She squints at him slightly. "You know better than that."

"It isn't in a heart-shaped frame," he points out. "Nobody's going to look that closely."

"That's a relief," she says. "No more bugs in my pen."

"Or your wall socket," he says, "and no cameras in the ceiling."

"Some days I don't know how we survived," she says.

"We were saved by good works," he tells her. "Or maybe some measure of grace. We kept the faith."

"We did," she says. "However strangely."

"I always thought heaven would be a little better lit than this," he jokes.

"If there's anything I've learned from my years working with you, Mulder, it's that one should always expect the unexpected," she says, and checks her watch. "I've got to get back."

"See you around," he says, tinting it with a question.

"I'm sure you will," she tells him, and then she's gone. He watches her weave her way across the office floor, striding firmly over the dingy carpet. Her hair seems redder again; it draws his eye like a beacon. He sips at his coffee and lets it heat him from the inside out. All the years later and she's still keeping him warm. It's enough, for today. He turns back to his file.


	10. Update

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On a Wednesday in August, she finds him in the hallway.

It is strange, to be back in the BAU. The only human whose head he's tried to get into in the last few years is Scully's. His thoughts have been full of mutants and exogenesis and conspiracies, no room for the rest of humanity in all its twisted majesty. What a piece of work is man, he thinks, and god too, if there is one, for creating such a species. He riddles his way through the profiles he's given, content with the work. He was never in it for the big office and the antique desk. 

He wonders if someone has taken over the basement office yet. He wonders if they ever got all the smudges of smoke out of the corners of the ceiling. He wonders what happened to all of their files, if they're blocked in by batiments of boxes of old documents, relics of the FBI's attempts to go paperless. But he misses it like he misses the house in Chilmark, or the summer place in Quonochontaug: his memories of those places are memories of the people with whom he shared them. The basement will be just another musty room without Scully, the way his ideas of home died when Samantha vanished.

He sees her around now, striding through the hallways, her red hair glinting. It draws his eye, no matter what else he's engaged in. She ventures out into the shared spaces more often now, he thinks. She was hiding from him before. She knows he knows that, but he passed her test by not seeking her out. He thinks obliquely of the Jersey Devil, who hunted him down and slashed him open. Scully has a strain of that wildness in her too. But he knows how to track a wild thing, and how to sit and wait for her to figure out he's not a threat. Never again will he promise her a nice trip to the forest; they will hold to the sunlit paths and let the darkness keep its own company under the canopies of the trees, no matter what strange call comes from the shadows. 

When he thinks about it, it all sounds like a fairy tale, grim and grotesque, as fairy tales were intended to be. In high school French, the happy endings promised long lives and lots of children. At least he and Scully have still got the chance for one of those. He opens his desk drawer, pretending to rummage around for a pencil, and gazes at the picture of William. He has to ration out these moments to himself when the world gets too strange. He could stare for hours at the curve of William's head, the fall of Scully's hair, two sets of long drooping lashes. No, there won't be many children in their happy ending, if they manage to write it, but at least somewhere in the world is proof that they loved each other beyond what seemed achievable. At least there was William. At least, for a little while, there was Emily (and he has always suspected - it seems the perfect cruel irony the minds of old men could comprehend - and he will never ask). 

Someone wanders over with that purposeful shuffle, file in hand, and he shuts the drawer. The photograph of him and Scully hasn't provoked any questions. A photograph of Scully and a child, tucked away like a secret, would surely provide fuel for the efficient machine of office gossip. Agent Harrison seems to be the only person who knows anything about their history, and it's almost pleasant that way. He has a clean slate. 

There's a rhythm to his work and a rhythm to his days. He works. He runs. He unpacks boxes that haven't seen the light of day in years and discards the things he doesn't need. He smooths the baby clothes under his hand and then puts them in a bag to donate. His son never wore them. That doesn't mean nobody's child ever should. He recycles most of his papers from college but keeps a journal full of odd lines of poetry. Scully would enjoy it, he thinks. He read her thesis and made notes in the margin, but she never had anything of his from that time in his life. Here is his younger self, preserved in the scrawl of ink on yellowing paper, melodramatic and tilting at windmills. She will either love it or burn it.

On a Wednesday in August, she finds him in the hallway. 

"I was asked to give this to you," she says, holding out an envelope. "Autopsy results for the Nguyen case." 

"You don't have to make excuses if you want to talk to me, Scully," he teases, taking the file. "My number hasn't changed." 

"Neither have you." She blinks up at him, trying to look fierce, but he can tell she's amused by the way the corners of her lips compress. She has a few lines around her eyes these days. He is deep enough in love to find them charming. They soften the stark beauty of her face. And there he goes again, getting lost in her eyes, and no map could ever help him see his way clear. 

"I don't know," he says. "I feel like the new and improved model. Fox Mulder 2.0." 

"I'm surprised you had the memory left to upgrade," she teases.

"Ha," he says. "That's good, Scully. Smartphone jokes. Very topical."

They are standing the way they have always stood: their bodies canted to make a shelter for their conversation, him leaning gently down over her. Twenty years of habit will not be undone. 

"Do you want to get coffee?" he asks. "Just coffee, no expectations. I owe you for the other week."

"Do you make that clarification every time you ask someone out for coffee?" Scully parries. 

"Only if I'm afraid they might be overcome by the urge to jump my bones," he says, testing the waters, and she glints at him. He's treading on dangerous ground, flirting with her in the office. They are - he doesn't know the word - estranged, or separated, or broken up, or seeing other people, and for any of those reasons and more he shouldn't talk to her like she's Scully, but he can't possibly treat her like other people. 

"What about the urge to step on your toes?" she asks, too sweetly. 

He glances down. "Less of a concern. I like the new shoes, though."

"Thank you," she says, in that voice that says "I couldn't possibly care less that you noticed" and "I'm pleased that you cared" all at once. God, how many times has he heard that voice. 

They look at each other. He forgets what he wanted to say. For a wordless moment, they are synchronized, as if they had never fallen out of step. 

"I really just came over here to give you these results," she murmurs. 

"All we've established is that you didn't come over here to jump my bones," he says, pushing his limits. "Allegedly."

"It is not my intention, at this moment, to jump your bones," she says, and the tilt of her head says he's gone far enough. "I will, however, accept your offer of coffee."

"A bold move, Agent Scully," he says. "When and where?"

"I'll text you," she says. "Your number hasn't changed. Allegedly."

"My phone's on silent after ten," he tells her, and he's unabashedly playing for time, but it's such a relief just to stand here with her. Some tension he hadn't even been aware of before releases, his soul and his body unknotting, and he feels twenty years younger, though there are lines around his eyes too.

"As if I'm not the world expert in leaving messages for you," she says wryly. "'This is Fox Mulder. I've run off to Puerto Rico or Russia or possibly the Arctic on the strength of a message I found in my breakfast cereal. Leave a message with your name and number and I'll get back to you if I haven't been taken prisoner by shadowy government forces.'"

"That's not verbatim," he says in a lofty voice.

"It might as well be," she tells him. 

"I'm a new man," he says. "I text back."

"Promise?" she asks, and he hears the challenge in it.

"Promise," he tells her. "Pinky promise." He reaches down with his free hand and hooks his pinky through hers, gently swinging her hand back and forth. Her finger is cool, locked in the crook of his. He remembers how it always took her hours to warm up after an autopsy. 

"That sounds serious, Agent Mulder," she says, and the backs of her fingers brush his as she disengages. 

"As the grave," he agrees, and it's all right. He doesn't flinch, or have to tap his fingers for solace. His voice doesn't quaver. His stomach doesn't drop. He's all right. He sees her appraising him with her doctor eyes. It seems like he passes muster, but she's back on track now, after their brief detour into the way things used to be.

"Did we schedule your wellness visit?" she asks. 

"I don't remember," he says. "We can talk about it over coffee. Synchronize our calendars. Discuss getting a dog."

"Why would we need to talk about getting a dog?" she asks. 

"It's still your house," he tells her. "It seemed polite."

She nods. She doesn't seem as irritated as she has been before, when he's mentioned the house. Maybe she's done some healing of her own. Maybe she's so far gone she doesn't care anymore. Whatever tension that had eased creeps back and lays light fingers between his shoulders. 

"I wouldn't want it to be a place you wouldn't want to come back to," he adds.

"Don't worry about that," she says. "Get a dog if you want one." 

"I'm not exactly sure how to interpret that," he tells her.

Briefly her pinky curls through his. "Don't worry," she repeats. "I have to get back to work."

"Text me," he says, and she nods, already gone.

He goes back to his desk and opens the drawer, reaching all the way to the back for a rubber band he doesn't need, the envelope full of her notes on his desk and her blissful, weary expression and William's round head under his fingertips for just a moment as he draws his hand out again.


	11. Tea

His phone makes its cheerful little jingling sound as he's on his way to therapy. He doesn't go as often anymore, but it feels good to check in. His therapist always seems pleased and that's a sign to pay attention to. There are fewer resentful silences in their sessions, fewer open wounds.

He swipes his thumb across the screen as he walks into the waiting room. 

"Sunday," says the text. "Teaism Dupont. Ten a.m."

He sends her back the little picture of the cup of coffee and imagines her face as she reads it.

"You seem like you're in a good mood today," his therapist says.

"Yeah," he says. "Things are good."

"I'm glad to hear it," she tells him. "How's work?"

He tells her about the boundaries he's put between himself and the cases, and about the routines he's put in his days. She nods approvingly. They talk around the details of the people he's riddling out and the ones he's unraveled. She doesn't press him; he is grateful for her familiarity with the particulars of his profession. 

"How does it feel to be back at the Bureau but not investigating the X-Files?" she asks him.

"It's fine," he says, and he means it. "It's less complicated. It helps that we're at Quantico and not in the Hoover Building."

"We?" his therapist says gently.

"Dana's assigned there too," he says. It's easier to say her name than it used to be. It helps separate the Scully he talks about at therapy from the Scully he sees in the hallways. The one he loves without restraint or condition and the one he works with might look the same, but he treats them differently, at least in his process. He has never had a problem working with Scully. They're a perfect match as colleagues.

"Is that difficult?" his therapist asks.

"No," he says. "We're in different divisions. She does her thing, I do mine. We meet in the middle, if at all."

"It sounds like you're both handling your transition well," his therapist says. 

He smiles and doesn't tell her about pinky promises in the hallways, the way they still wall themselves off from the rest of the world, the mix of hope and dread he felt when she told him not to worry. Some things about him were never broken.

Sunday morning, he wakes early and goes for a run. The air is swampy, but he needs to burn off the energy. He's drenched in sweat by the time he gets back to the house. He takes a cold shower and swigs from a glass of ice water as he dresses. His new jeans fit in a much more flattering way than the ones he donated. He leaves the top few buttons of his shirt undone - he's still too hot for an undershirt. 

The tea place is busy, but he sees Scully right away. She looks relaxed in linen pants and a sleeveless blouse, big sunglasses pushed up into her hair. He's never seen either of those items of clothing before. She seems to go through stages in her wardrobe, some sort of punctuated equilibrium of fashion where she suddenly upgrades everything and catches up with the trends. He remembers it happening around the time they went to Antarctica - all at once she was all black suits with tight skirts and undone buttons on her white dress shirts instead of the colorful quirky pantsuits with the shoulder pads. It's happened again, and she looks more poised and polished than ever. She stands her ground in the crowd, even in flat sandals. 

"Hey," he says, hanging his sunglasses from the vee of his shirt, because of course he picked the one without pockets.

"Hey," she says, and the way she tips her face up makes him lean down and kiss her cheek automatically. He pulls back and looks at her, gauging whether to apologize or not, but she smiles slightly and he relaxes. 

"I thought we said coffee, Scully," he teases.

"Neither of us is young enough to be slamming back espresso," she tells him. "Are you all right, Mulder? You look a little flushed."

"I went running," he says. 

She looks him up and down, her eyes lingering on his chest where his shirt is open. "Good. I'm glad you're getting your exercise in."

"As my doctor?" he asks. "Or just as an interested party?"

She rolls her eyes, but there's the hint of a smile in the corner of her mouth. 

She orders mint tea, hot, even though it's already in the eighties, and he has an iced Earl Grey that tastes like studying too late at Oxford, his tea gone cold while he turned pages and scribbled notes. He picks up a bag of salted oatmeal cookies as she's ordering a double helping of some kind of sweet potatoes. 

"Lunch," she explains. 

"I wasn't judging, Scully," he says, and pays for all of it, despite the look she gives him. "I told you, I'm taking you out for coffee. Or tea and sweet potatoes. It's not like we've ever been traditional."

"No, we never have," she says. "Thank you."

"To my gainful employment," he says, clinking the lip of his glass against her cup. They both sip. He sighs with pleasure at the chill that runs down through his chest. Scully seems unaffected by the heat of her tea, though steam curls lazily up from the cup. The chatter and the clinking of cups and spoons wraps cozily around them, the words too muffled to comprehend. They can hear each other, but nobody else is listening to them.

"This is nice," she says. "I wish we'd done this more often."

"We drank a lot of coffee," he says. "Back in the day. If I had known you preferred tea…."

"You know what I mean," she tells him, but there's no exasperation in her voice.

"I do know what you mean," he says. "I didn't think you'd want to go out with me, especially after spending every working hour together."

"Mulder," she says, "for a profiler, you certainly do miss the signs sometimes."

"It was right under my nose," he jokes, gesturing at the height of her head when she's standing in front of him. She reaches across and breaks off part of his cookie.

"Hey!" he protests.

"You deserved it," she says, and he shrugs his assent. The only thing her height has ever stopped her from doing is getting things off the highest shelf in the kitchen. 

"Thank you," he says. 

"What for?" She sips at her tea.

"For coming here with me," he says. 

"You thought I wouldn't come," she says.

He shrugs one shoulder. "I think there was a time you wouldn't have said yes. In fact, I think there was a time you didn't say yes."

"I didn't say no," she reminds him. "I said ask me again. And you did."

"The most terrifying moment of my life," he jokes. "Hey, next weekend, do you want to go to the junior prom?"

"Why do you think I moved out?" she asks suddenly.

He blows out a long breath. "Scully, that's a heavy question when it isn't even happy hour."

"I didn't leave because I didn't love you," she says. "I didn't leave because I didn't want to be your friend. You shut me out."

"I know," he says. "I'm sorry."

"It was too hard," she tells him.

"I know," he says. "Thank you."

"For leaving?" The skepticism in her voice sends a little frisson through him. He's missed that so much, that give and take between them. 

"For telling me why you left," he says. "For not abandoning me entirely."

"I told you, Mulder, it would have taken too long to explain your health history to anyone else," she says, stirring her tea. 

He reaches out and takes her hand. Her fingers clench and then relax in his. "Scully. Thank you."

"You're welcome," she says quietly. 

"I haven't been an easy person to live with," he says. "You didn't deserve that."

"Hmm," she says, a noncommittal sound. 

They drink their tea for a moment. She gazes into her cup. He eats part of his cookie. It's the perfect texture, homey and sweet. It makes him think of holiday baking, curled up on the couch with Scully as they waited for the oven timer to ding, the whole house filled with the perfume of sugar and spices. When he looks up, she's watching him, her eyes still lingering on his exposed chest. 

"You look good," she says. 

"So do you," he tells her.

"Regular hours and a skin care routine," she says wryly. "Makes all the difference in the world."

"No madmen dragging you out of bed at all hours to hunt snipes," he suggests.

"No," she agrees. "No madmen in or out of bed."

"A woman like you?" he teases. "You should be beating them off with a stick."

"If a gun didn't work, I can't expect a stick would suffice," she says.

"Touché." He takes a swallow of tea. "I thought you were seeing someone." 

She sighs. "I gave up," she says. "It was pointless."

"Why pointless?" he asks, his heart lifting.

"What can you talk about?" she says wryly. "'What do you do for a living?' 'Have you ever shot anyone?' 'Do you have any kids?'"

He winces. "Did you tell them you shot your partner?"

She rolls her eyes. "No. Should I have?"

"You would have weeded out some of them pretty quickly," he tells her.

"What would it have said about the ones who were left?" she asks.

"Good point," he says. 

"I think I've met my quota of madmen," she says. "A lifetime's worth."

"I'm not as mad as I used to be," he offers.

"No," she says slowly. "I can almost believe in Mulder 2.0."

"Almost," he says. 

"I just don't want to think that you're doing all of this just for me," she tells him.

"At first I was," he says. "But then I wasn't. If you told me you were never coming home, I wouldn't stop. I can't rely on you for my happiness."

"No," she says. "Sometimes there isn't enough to go around."

"I seem to remember telling you once that you made me a whole person," he says.

"I seem to remember that too," she says with a wry twist to her mouth. Subconsciously, she reaches up to touch her neck.

"That wasn't fair," he tells her. "I wanted to tell you how I felt about you, but that wasn't the right way to say it. I put a heavy burden on you."

She lifts her eyes to his. "Thank you," she says after a moment. 

"I don't need you to complete me," he says. "You don't need to carry that weight. I can be responsible for my own well-being now. But that being said, Scully, I don't feel entirely myself unless you're around."

"I know what you mean," she says, and they gaze at each other. The silence heaps up between them like snow on Christmas Eve, soft and sweet. 

He offers her a cookie and she takes it and breaks it into small pieces, eating them slowly.

"Can we start over?" she says. 

"All over?" he asks. "Twenty-three years is a lot to rewind, Scully."

"I know that," she says. "I don't want to erase any of that. But we could do this. Coffee. Dinner. Drinks after work once in a while."

"What does your therapist say about that?" he asks.

Scully purses her lips. "She says that codependency is rarely positive. Yours?"

"The same thing. I think they have a script. Maybe we should have gone to marriage counseling instead," he teases. "At least they wouldn't be trying to keep us apart."

"She makes me call you Fox," Scully complains. 

"Mine too," he says. "Dana."

"It sounds so strange," she complains.

"I don't know," he says. "I don't mind it as much as I did."

"Fox," she says again, testing him. He shrugs. 

"If that's what you need to make this feel new," he tells her. 

She shakes her head. "Maybe on special occasions." She sighs and picks up her tea. "Nobody understands us but us, Mulder."

"It's lonely sometimes," he says. "But I'd rather be lonely with you than anybody else."

She looks up at him. "When I said you didn't need to worry about a dog, I didn't mean because I wasn't coming home."

"No?" he says. 

"No," she says with a little smile. "I like dogs. I've wanted another dog for a while. It just never seemed like the right time."

"Oh," he says. "What kind of dog?"

"Doesn't matter," she says.

"Maybe not a Pomeranian," he tells her. "Too many natural predators."

"I don't chase swamp monsters anymore," she says. "I don't think it would be a concern."

"Things change," he says.

"Some things don't," she tells him, and drinks her tea.

She lets him kiss her cheek again when they leave, her carrying her takeaway box of sweet potatoes, him carrying a spark of hope in the hand cupped over his heart.


	12. Fortune

The dog happens by accident. He's running a new route one day and he passes a farmer's market and suddenly there's a dog bounding joyfully along beside him, wearing a red vest and dragging a leash. It's some kind of mutt, medium sized, with longish hair and one rakish ear. He slows and stops and catches hold of the dog, which wags and nuzzles at his fingers. A disheveled volunteer in a similar vest dashes up. Her nametag says "Alondra :)" 

"I'm so sorry!" she says. "It's his first time out at the market and I got distracted and he's really strong and…."

"It's okay," Mulder says. "He seems like a nice dog." He offers the leash to the volunteer. She takes it and tugs gently. The dog sits down on Mulder's foot. 

"Oh," she says in a weak voice. "I haven't done this a lot before." She pulls on the leash, but the dog just leans against Mulder's leg and pants.

"It's really okay," Mulder reassures her. He takes the leash back and the dog jumps up. They walk back to the other volunteers with their red-vested dogs, which cheerfully proclaim "I'm adoptable!" Several of the dogs have dollar bills poking out of pockets. 

"So this guy's available to adopt?" Mulder asks.

"He sure is!" Alondra tells him. "And we're doing ten dollar adoptions all weekend!"

"Must be fate," Mulder says to the dog, who looks up at him with bright eyes and a lolling tongue. He fills out the paperwork that afternoon and stops at PetSmart on the way home for everything a dog could need. The dog noses around the house and flops down on the rug near Mulder's feet with a sigh, gazing up with soulful eyes. Mulder tosses him a treat. 

"You need a name, buddy," he says. "It was fate that we found each other, so how about Kismet?"

The dog's tail thumps the floor lazily.

"Kismet it is," Mulder says. 

\+ + + + 

He has to get a lint roller to keep the dog hair off his suits, but it's worth it to come home to a house that isn't empty. They run in the mornings and walk in the evenings. Kismet quickly learns to answer to both "Kis" and "Mutt", and Mulder entertains himself by trying to teach the dog to play dead to the cue of "Invasion!" He buys a new vacuum. Kis watches him pick up all the dog toys and pile them on the cushion, and then drags them all all over the floor as Mulder tries to sweep up the worst of the hair. But it's fun. It's comforting. Having a dog feels right. He's been taking care of himself for long enough; it feels good to be in a place where he has the energy to care for something else. 

He's too busy at work to tell Scully about it, working under a deadline while she's up to her elbows in students and corpses. He texts her a picture of Kis sleeping with his head on a stuffed dinosaur, but she doesn't text back. A few days later on the weekend when he's running with Kis in the park and there she is, running the other way. She's got her hair pulled back into a ponytail that bounces and she looks sleek in her running clothes, a small water bottle strapped to her hand. 

"Fancy meeting you here," he says as Kis dances at the end of his leash, straining toward her.

Scully crouches down and ruffles Kis' ears. She looks up at Mulder. "Must be fate," she says.

"Funny you should say that," he says. "This is Kismet."

"You didn't name him Iced Tea?" she teases. Sweat gleams on her collarbones. 

"That's the next dog," he says. "Either that or Yankee."

She stands up, sending Kis into further raptures. "That's a big step, Mulder." Her eyes are soft. She sips water from her bottle and gazes thoughtfully at him.

"I've got long legs," he jokes.

"He's definitely cuter than the fish," she tells him, reaching down to scratch Kis' head. 

"Harder to clean up after, though," he says. 

They look at each other while Kis makes happy little grunting noises and wanders from hand to hand to be petted. 

"Going my way?" he says at last. 

"I think I was," she says.

He clicks his tongue at Kis, who comes to heel, and they settle into a comfortable pace. 

"Doesn't seem like your usual route," he says.

"I hadn't run it in a while," she says. "Sometimes you miss the old neighborhood."

He doesn't ask her if that means she's coming home. He knows better. "I'm sure it misses you," he says instead. "Scenic views." He cuts his eyes at her ass, which is shown off to great advantage by her skintight running capris. 

She rolls her eyes at him. "I'm sure there are other views for them to appreciate."

"Scully, are you flirting with me?" he asks in a mock-scandalized tone.

"Some things will never change," she says, shaking her head and making her ponytail bounce.

"Is that good or bad?" he asks.

"Good," she says, "when they're the things I loved about you before."

She runs all the way back to the house with them, and comes in to refill her bottle. She kisses him in the doorway as she leaves, lips hot against his. He watches her go and licks salt from his mouth as Kis whines from the cool kitchen floor. 

\+ + + + 

They are professional at work: no more pinky promises in the hallway, in full view of their colleagues; no hushed conversations in corners; no perching on the corner of each other's desks. But they manage to see each other more, somehow. He'll glimpse her walking past, and her eyes will slide to him as she talks to someone else, or he'll take the long way to walk past her office and nod when she looks up. 

It's enough, to see her. When their eyes meet across the room, he'd swear he can hear her saying his name in that soft round pleased voice. He wonders if she can hear him.

The picture on his desk doesn't look like two other people anymore. He can see himself in the silhouette that gazes down at Scully's heart-shaped face. This Mulder and that Mulder co-exist; he's found a state of equilibrium in himself, the triple point where past, present, and future are stable. It took him longer to figure out the way the universe weighs on him, but he's not the scientist. She'll forgive him for that.

If he could tell their younger selves anything, it would be "Hold on". But their younger selves never listened to anything but each other's heartbeats, thudding quietly underneath the noise of the rest of the world. 

\+ + + + 

They start running together on the weekends, not by any agreement. She just shows up with her shoes on and they do loops until they wear out the dog. She starts to linger afterward. He makes coffee and they complain about the Bureau, sitting at the kitchen table, sharing croissants from Le Caprice or sacher torte from the Watergate Bakery (she seems thin lately and he worries in an abstract way, but she eats when they're together). He likes the way she goes straight to the cabinet with the mugs; she still remembers where everything is. He hasn't moved anything since she left, but she hasn't forgotten.

She always leaves eventually with the excuse of a shower, but 9 turns into 10 turns into noon turns into afternoon, until they're eating lunch together and bickering amicably over the finer points of investigation. And sometimes she texts him to see if he's still in the office, and they have dinner after work, and sometimes he texts her to tell her about bar trivia, and they go and drink and pits their wits against the teams of college students whose names are all varyingly sophisticated innuendo, and sometimes he kisses her goodnight and sometimes he doesn't. August turns into September turns into October and the leaves are changing. Kismet romps through a drift of leaves and shovels them into the air with his face as they laugh, out of breath, and pass a bottle of water back and forth between them.

"Is this working?" he texts her. "I feel like it's working."

"It's working," she texts back immediately.

"Score one for codependence," he texts.

"You're incorrigible," she tells him.

"Is that your medical opinion?" he asks.

"A diagnosis after all these years," she says. 

He grins and taunts Kismet with a ball.

\+ + + + 

For his birthday, she gives him a six pack of beer and a copy of The Lazarus Bowl. They watch it together on the couch with Kis draped between them, his head in Scully's lap. She scratches his ears with idle fingers as the movie plays out on the screen in front of them.

"I'd forgotten how awful this is," she says.

"I think I'm free-associating," he says. 

"God, Wayne Federman," she says, tucking her feet up under herself so that her shoulder cants toward his. "Can you imagine Skinner in college, making friends with that guy?"

"College parties, Scully," he says. "Surely you've experienced them."

"This may surprise you, Mulder," she tells him, "but I didn't go to very many college parties. The pre-med curriculum keeps you busy."

"Not to mention rewriting Einstein for your thesis," he teases. 

"I'll never live that down," she murmurs, smiling at the dog in her lap. 

"I was charmed," he tells her. "If they were sending me a green agent to keep an eye on me, at least it was somebody smart enough to question the workings of the universe."

"Or foolish enough," she says. 

It's the easiest thing he's done in a while, slipping his arm around her shoulders. Easier than breathing, easier than thought. "Not foolish," he tells her. 

Kis grumbles as she shifts closer, leaving less space between herself and Mulder. Mulder nudges gently at him and Kis heaves himself off the couch and lies down on his bed, looking resentfully at both of them.

"What did I know at twenty-three?" she murmurs. 

"More than I know now," he tells her. "Time changes people."

"But not so much that you don't know them," she says. 

"Maybe it depends on how far you go," he says.

She shakes her head. "I like to think you can always come home, no matter how long you're away. That the connections between people can't be severed by distance or time."

"I like to think that too," he says. 

She tips her face up and he leans down and rests his forehead against hers for a long moment. She sighs and it's a sweet sound. When she turns her head, it's to lay it on his shoulder. Her hand rests on his thigh. 

"This movie really is terrible," she says.

"We had fun, though," he says. "California. Micah Hoffman. Dinner. Dancing. I have a confession, though, Scully."

"What?" She doesn't lift her head, just settles deeper into the curve of his body.

"I was in the bath when I called you," he says. "When I told you Skinner was taking a bubble bath. Skinman wasn't the only one who went Hollywood that night."

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see her smile. "Me too."

"Ah, Scully," he says with satisfaction. 

"We've always been like-minded," she says. "In our way."

"We could have been in the bath together," he says, and smirks at the thought that he's testing the waters.

"There's still time," she says. "The tub isn't as big here, though."

"Any time you need me to make a run to Lush, Scully, you just say the word," he says.

And it isn't as if she never left - there will never be a time that he forgets that she left. There will never be a time when he forgets how empty his life was, how empty his heart was. He had hollowed himself out and filled the space with half-truths and campfire stories and left no place for her. But she is here now, snug under the arch that his arm makes, not filling a hole, but adding a new dimension to the life he has reconstituted from the pieces that still fit. She is Scully and he is Mulder and it's the same as ever and nothing like it was before.

On the screen, the Cigarette-Smoking Pontiff threatens the ersatz Scully, and the dead offer the faux Mulder a crown. They watch the amalgamations of themselves embrace and listen to the heavy breathing. Kismet looks up and then makes another grumbling noise and lies down again.

"How did they know about the bees?" Scully asks suddenly.

"I'm blaming Skinner," he says.

"Did you tell him we kissed?" she asks.

"We didn't kiss," he says.

"Mulder," she says in that no-nonsense tone, "kissing was imminent."

"Imminent, perhaps, but not consummated," he tells her. 

"Consummated or not," she says, "you must have told Skinner."

"I don't remember telling him," Mulder hedges. "On the other hand, I did get shot. I might not have been in my right mind."

"Hmm," she says.

"Maybe Frohike had my hallway bugged," he suggests.

"That does sound like him," Scully agrees. "For a number of reasons."

"I don't know if that's the important part," Mulder says. 

She rolls her head on his shoulder and looks up at him for a long beat. "All right, I'll bite. What's the important part?" Scully asks. 

"It seems to me we never really got that first kiss," he says. 

"Logically our next kiss would be our first kiss," she says, sitting up. "New Year's, maybe. Not the millennium, might I remind you."

"All these years later, still a math geek," he says. "But that's not our first kiss, Scully. We missed it." 

"Mulder, that doesn't make any sense. The first time we kissed was our first kiss," she argues.

"But it's not the first time we were going to kiss," he insists. "That's what counts. There's a magic to the first kiss. A hallway in a hospital can't recapture that moment, Dick Clark or no."

"That wasn't magical for you?" she asks, a smile hiding in the corner of her mouth. 

"It was," he says. "But it wasn't like the moment I knew I was going to kiss you for the first time, and I saw you knew it too."

"I did," she says, and her voice is just a little huskier than it was before. 

"I had my hands around your face," he says, turning to demonstrate. "And you had your hand on the back of my neck."

"I remember," she says. Her hand slips up over his shoulder, her nails scratching lightly around his neck. "And you looked at me with these eyes that see forever."

"And you looked back at me," he says. "And you were a little afraid."

"I was," she says. "But I wanted it. I wanted you to do it."

"I was terrified," he says. "That you were going to leave. That I'd never see you again. That you wouldn't know what you meant to me. I told the truth badly, because I was scared."

"I knew," she says. "I was afraid of the same things. But you leaned toward me, so slowly."

"I wanted to give you an out," he says, following the stage directions for the scene they lived so many years ago. 

"Xeno's paradox," she says, her face drawing closer to his. "I thought you would never reach me, always coming halfway."

"We've always met each other halfway," he murmurs, almost against her lips.

"And then just as your lips brushed mine," she says, her breath hot on his skin.

"A sting rang out," he jokes, but the words are muffled against her mouth as she kisses him with all the frustrated passion of their younger years, all their pain and their fear and their bone-deep need of each other. She pulls him down and he leans into her, his world bracketed by her hands and her lips, her tongue and her teeth a thunderstorm against his own. They are subsumed by each other, submerged, swept up in the crash and the flood of each other. He pulls her closer and she moans a little, and Kismet barks, and they break apart, laughing.

"That's enough commentary from the peanut gallery," Mulder says, pointing, and Kismet barks again. 

"If it isn't bees, it's dogs," she says. "Just our luck, Mulder."

"I feel lucky," he tells her.

"Have we redeemed ourselves?" she asks, smoothing her hair. Her cheeks are flushed.

"I think that's a definite yes," Mulder tells her. "I felt the magic. Did you feel it, Scully? Our first kiss."

Scully turns off the movie. "I'd like to feel it again, with less interference."

"Of course," he says. "I know how you like solid evidence, Scully."

"I'm a scientist," she says demurely. "I prefer not to extrapolate from limited data. But I'm willing to hear your further thoughts on the subject of magic as related to first kisses."

"Mutt, office," Mulder commands, and Kismet goes into his kennel, casting Mulder a slightly put-upon look as Mulder closes the door. 

Scully slips her hand into Mulder's and leads him upstairs and god, her lips and her hands and the way their bodies move in perfect time. It's everything the first time should be, and it only took them twenty years to get there. They are lucky, he thinks as he falls asleep. They are so lucky, after all.


	13. Home

The first time he sees her apartment is when he's helping her move out of it. It's early March. He comes by after lunch. Taking a whole day off work seemed like too much, like he was too eager to pry her out of her solitary space. The movers look at him and grunt, younger men all, casting sidelong looks at the fossil in the suit. Scully squeezes his bicep as she goes past and he thinks of how he took her out to dinner for her birthday and she looked at him very seriously over the candles and the wine glasses and told him she wanted to live together again. 

"I'll clean out a drawer for you," he joked, as if she hadn't been moving back in by inches over the last few months. First a toothbrush and a few changes of clothes, then her vitamins in the cabinet again, her shampoo in the shower, the shape of her warm against him in the morning while Kismet whined for his run.

She gave him that level stare, the one that said, "Mulder, be serious" without any words at all.

He reached across the table and took her hand. "I really didn't know if you would ever want to be with me again."

"Neither did I," she said. "But it feels right, Mulder. I've been happy with you, the last few months. We've been happy together."

"That's all I could ever want," he told her. "We can move, if you'd rather have someplace that feels like neutral ground."

"No," she said. "Mulder, I want to come home."

She called the movers the next day.

Now he's standing in her living room, marveling at how she could live somewhere and not infuse it with any of her personality. He remembers her old apartment in Maryland with fondness: light wood and that overstuffed couch with the stripes, furnished by a much younger Scully who hadn't yet developed an aesthetic. What's left in here has clean stark lines, all too modern for his taste. There are no signs that she had any art up. He can't imagine a coffee cup sitting in the sink for more than a few hours. It could be anybody's apartment, just a waystation en route to somewhere else. After all those months on the road, he's both surprised and unsurprised she would live somewhere with the feel of a hotel.

He carries a few boxes of fragile things out to the car. Scully is directing the movers, her feet planted and her chin lifted. They meekly do her bidding, handling the boxes with the utmost care. People come by to take away the furniture. Scully counts her cash and tucks it into the glovebox. 

"Your Craigslist furniture business seems profitable," he quips when they stop for a break. "You're not quitting the FBI, are you?"

"My pieces didn't work with yours," she tells him. 

"That's not what you said last night," he teases.

She blushes, absurdly. Everything has been new between them since October, a second honeymoon of sorts to replace the tension of their first weeks together. He would say he doesn't know what they did to deserve this sort of grace, but he remembers living most of it, and she's told him the rest when his memory has failed. Hell and high water, fire and brimstone, dust to dust. They have earned this easy sweetness, and he relishes it.

"I'm glad you like my furnishings," he says with a wink.

"Well," she murmurs, "we might need a new mattress. I'm not sure the old one's up to the challenge." 

"Hey, Scully," he says, "we never made out in your apartment."

"Now that's a shame," she says, and lets him press her against the kitchen counter. Her mouth is sweet and hungry and he wants to let her devour him. Only the whistling of the returning movers reminds them that they're not alone.

"To be continued," she whispers, and makes good on her promise later, as they lie in their bed.

"Scully, you live here," he marvels. 

"I feel like this is where you would say 'Honey, I'm home'," she says, with a smile. She's still smiling when he kisses her. She fits her body against his, lining up all the right places, and if the world were going to end, he thinks, let it be now, when they have found their rapture.

They undress each other with reverence and kiss each other like worshipers. Her tongue is in his mouth and he gives her all of himself. They are on their sides, wrapped up entirely in each other, moving in such blissful synchronicity that he could imagine they have never disagreed. Their bodies, at least, have never been at odds.

She shifts her hips and laces her fingers into his as she moves his hand over her body. When she comes undone, he is there to hold her together, and vice versa. When he wakes up, she is still tucked under his chin, as if he is the blanket she pulls over herself. He lies quietly and savors the moment. 

There will be more mornings like this, he thinks, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

She stirs, smiles, and closes her eyes again. He closes his eyes too, and drifts in the warmth of their bed.

They take a couple of days off to unpack all her things. Her coat hangs next to his in the closet. Her shoes line up neatly on the rack. Her books fit right back onto the bookshelf next to his. Scully turns on the radio and sings along tunelessly to the greatest hits of the 80s, 90s, and today while Kismet flourishes his toys in an attempt to distract her from reorganizing the shelves. Mulder comes up behind her and sweeps her hair to the side so he can kiss the nape of her neck. She turns into his arms and they sway to "Private Eyes", as aimless as if they're the first couple on the dance floor at a wedding.

They haven't talked about getting married in a long time. He's fine with that. No one has ever managed to keep him from her side. Maybe he'll suggest it in a few years, when he can be sure he isn't building another trap for her. She looks fantastic for fifty-two, but neither of them is getting younger, and he wants to be certain that all he has is hers.

"Would you go back to the X-Files if they reopened them tomorrow?" she asks, her voice and her eyes dreamy.

"Not without you," he says. "And not unless it was your idea. I'd be afraid of myself, Scully."

"I wouldn't let you fall into the darkness," she says fiercely.

"You shouldn't have to rein me in," he tells her. "It's too much to ask of you."

"Are you happy without the work?" she asks, her eyes shadowed.

He kisses her forehead. "I still have everything that's important to me," he says. "If you ever want to spend the weekend investigated a haunted hotel, Scully, you let me know. I'll make reservations."

"Mulder," she says, and pauses.

"Hmm?" he prompts.

"Nothing," she says. "You told me once not to give up on a miracle. I thought I'd already gotten my miracle."

"Maybe this is mine," he says. "We'll share it, just like we did the last one."

The song changes, but it doesn't matter. They're still swaying in their living room as Kismet looks out the window and wags his tail. The weather outside is grey, but the light in their eyes is golden.

Before work the next morning, he hands her a box.

"What's this?" she asks, arching an eyebrow and setting down her coffee. "It's too early for nicely-wrapped presents, Mulder. My birthday was weeks ago."

"Official housewarming present," he says. "Open it."

Kismet sits at her feet and begs. Scully smiles at him and then looks back at Mulder. "Should I be worried?"

"Just open it," Mulder says. "It's from both of us."

Scully pries the lid off the box. 

"A lint roller," she says with amusement.

"You'll need it," Mulder says, and kisses her. Kismet wags and leans against her leg.

\+ + + + 

It works. They wake up together. They run together, with Kismet galloping beside them, tongue lolling. They drink coffee and take their vitamins. They drive to work together when it's convenient. They drive home together when they can. They work together when they need to. They compare notes on their therapists, who have accepted their reunion with wary resignation. It isn't perfect every day, but long years of tumbling words have worn the rough edges off their silences. They work around each other until they're ready to work together again. Kismet helps, running between them with his favorite stuffed hedgehog, offering it to one and then the other until he's lured them back into the same room.

He keeps a space for her in his life. He doesn't bring work home. Each of them understands when the other one has to stay late at the office. They keep the files out of the house. On the weekends, they run to the farmer's market where Kismet found Mulder and buy loaves of fresh bread and the first peas. Scully writes years-delayed monographs on anomalous physiognomy. Mulder works on his book. This, he thinks, is the greatest thing he's ever done, and it isn't the page count that he's proud of. They have carved a haven out of the wilderness of their past. They have found solace in quotidian humanity when he thought they might give their lives to a greater cause, without recompense or acknowledgement. He looks at Scully and still sees the soldier in her, but how far have they come when she doesn't reach for her gun each time Kismet kicks in his sleep or a board creaks. He never thought they would escape their instincts, the harrowed wariness the world taught them.

They make dinner, or go out. They split up the chores. Skinner comes over for dinner and they split a bottle of wine and talk about the wilderness years as Kismet gnaws noisily on a bone.

"Adulthood suits you," Skinner says as he leaves.

"I appreciate that, Walter," Mulder tells him, only half-wry, pinning Kismet with his leg so that the dog doesn't follow Skinner out into the night.

"What was all that about?" Scully asks.

Mulder shakes his head and smiles. "Nothing." 

She reaches up and brushes his hair out of his eyes. "I think you're going salt and pepper," she says affectionately.

"I've earned it," he tells her, and wraps his arms around her.

\+ + + + 

In April the phone rings in the middle of the night. Scully fumbles for it, answers it, and goes stiff against him.

"What is it?" Mulder mumbles

"Mom," Scully says, and they're out the door in whatever clothes they can drag on.

A heart attack, the doctor says. She's fine, the doctor says. Scully nods, but her face is pale, her lips pressed together in a thin line. Mulder rests his hand at the small of her back and she leans back almost imperceptibly against his palm. She demands to see her mother's charts. She calls her brothers. She glares at the doctors and holds her mother's hand.

"Dana, I'm fine," Maggie says. Her voice is weak, but her will is strong. He always knew where Scully's steel came from.

"Mom, you had a heart attack," Scully tells her. 

"I remember," Maggie says. "But I'm all right now."

"I'm going to make sure of that," Scully says. 

Mulder quietly makes sure she has coffee and something to eat, and sends her home when she needs to sleep.

"I'll be here," he tells her. 

She goes, but only at her mother's urging. She is back in a few hours, nipping at the doctor's heels, glaring at anyone who comes into the room. Maggie protests, but Scully ignores her. 

"There's nothing she can do," Maggie says as Scully stalks out of the room, on the hunt for a medical professional to whom she can give a piece of her mind.

"She's going to do it anyway," Mulder says.

"That's my little girl," Maggie sighs, but there's pride in her eyes.

They release Maggie a few days later. Mulder and Scully take her home. Mulder helps her into bed as Scully arranges the food in the fridge. Maggie catches his hand. Her fingers are cool.

"Thank you, Fox," she says. 

"It's good to see you," he says. "I wish it were under happier circumstances."

"Sometimes that's what family is like," she says. "At least Christmas was nice."

"It was," he agrees.

"I'm glad you found your way back to each other," Maggie tells him. "Take care of her, Fox."

"I will," he promises.

"I expect to see you both next Christmas," she says.

"We'll be there," he tells her, and she smiles and nestles into her pillows.

"I think I'll try to sleep a little," she says, and he squeezes her hand gently and goes to find Scully.

Scully is gone.

He pulls out his phone. She doesn't answer; he gets her voicemail. "Scully, it's me," he says. "Just let me know where you're going."

Maggie sleeps and he paces. Half an hour later, Scully texts him a picture: Sandy Point State Park. He calls Charlie from the number posted next to the landline and borrows Maggie's keys. 

The drive isn't as bad as it might be, but he drums his fingers on the wheel with impatience. There's no one at the toll booth; he swipes his car on the box and watches his knuckles turn white as he waits for the transaction to go through. Their car is the only other one in the parking lot. He jogs down to the beach. There is a solitary figure at the waterline. She doesn't turn around as he approaches, but she lets him put his arm around her waist.

"I'm sorry," she says. 

"It's all right," he says. "I was just worried."

"Suddenly it hit me," Scully says. "One day she'll be gone, and there won't be anything I can do to save her."

"That might be true one day," Mulder says. "But not yet."

Scully sighs and leans into him. They watch the waves roll in and out. The breeze off the water ruffles Scully's hair.

"They say the person you think of when you're standing by the ocean is the person you should be with," she says. 

"I think I heard that once," he says. "I probably said it once or twice during my teenage years. If you're trying to get to second base, Scully, the answer is yes."

"Mulder," she says.

"Sorry," he says. "It's a reflex."

"I know," she says, smiling wearily but sweetly up at him. "I've been testing your reflexes for years."

"Did you find what you were looking for?" he asks.

"I found you," she says. "Let's go home, Mulder."

"I've been waiting all my life to hear you say that, Scully," he tells her.

"We're not waiting anymore," she says, and takes his hand. They turn their backs on the ocean and walk back to the cars, two hearts yoked together by yearning, two souls building their own quiet peace.

\+ + + + 

_And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you — I am at rest with you — I have come home._  
\- Lord Peter Wimsey to Lady Harriet Wimsey (Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy Sayers, 1937)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million thanks to my squad, who held my hand through every word. Thank you to everyone who left me comments or kudos or emailed me or talked to me on Tumblr. It's meant the world to me.


	14. Valentine

He brings her lunch at work - a double order of sweet potatoes from Teaism and a sandwich for himself - and they eat together in her office, splitting a cupcake at the end of their meal. She produces it from her desk drawer with a smile. It’s apple spice cake, and it tastes like his grandmother’s recipe. He licks his fingers clean and watches her dab crumbs off her face without removing her lipstick.

“You know Valentine was a martyr,” he says.

“I’m Catholic,” she reminds him. She smiles wryly. 

“Not everybody’s versed in the mythology,” he counters. 

“Mulder,” she says, “first of all, I’ve spent long enough around you and studying ritualistic killers to have made a moderately exhaustive study of religious icons of any number of faiths.”

“Second of all?”

“Second of all, everybody knows that Valentine was a martyr,” she tells him. 

“Who’s your saint?” he asks. 

She smiles again. “Catherine.”

“Of course,” he says. “Who better than a princess who could out-argue anyone and who devoted herself to a higher cause?”

“Of course,” she says simply. “My saint’s day always got folded into Thanksgiving.”

“We’ve never celebrated Valentine’s Day in the office,” he says. 

“Is this leading up to some convoluted proposal?” she asks. “Because you don’t usually devote lunch to hagiography.”

He reaches into his pocket. “You know how to suck all the romance out of a room, Scully,” he says, setting a small box on the desk between them.

She looks at the box and back at him. “Mulder.”

He nudges it toward her. “Just open it.”

She reaches out and takes it, opening it gingerly, her eyes locked on his. Gold gleams gently against the dark velvet inside the box. 

“It doesn’t have to be a wedding ring,” he says, as she reaches in and takes it out, rolling it between her fingertips. “I had my mother’s jewelry melted down. I wanted to make something new.”

“We already made something new,” she says, her eyes luminous as she looks at him. 

“This is it, Scully,” he says, taking her hand. “For me. This is it. You’re it. I just wanted to mark the occasion.”

She hands him the ring and he slips it onto her finger. It doesn’t look like an engagement ring or a wedding band, exactly, but it looks right on her hand. He cradles her fingers with his and it’s a perfect moment, as magical as he might have expected from a wedding. They gaze at each other and he knows that this time, they’ll manage to make a life together that doesn’t draw the darkness to them.

“Don’t forget we have dinner reservations after therapy,” she says, and it sounds like a lifelong vow.

“I’ll be there,” he promises.

He goes back to work, feeling the absence of the box in his pocket after carrying it for weeks back and forth between his desk and hers. It’s a Tuesday, like and unlike any other, and he will never be the same. He passes a window and realizes that his reflection is smiling. 

Back at his desk, he takes out another box and opens it to look at his father’s wedding ring. He weighs it in his palm for a moment. His father, misguided, a man with poor instincts and worse friends. His father, who wasn’t there when he needed him. But his father was a patriot too, and loved his children.

He hesitates a second more and then slips on the ring. It fits him, and he thinks of genetics, the link between his father’s hands and his own. He opens his desk drawer again, takes out the photograph of William, and tucks the corner into the frame of the photograph of himself and Scully. He’ll get another frame for it tomorrow, but no member of his family will stay in the darkness.   
They are all made whole on this day of martyrs. They are done with sacrifice.


	15. amissibilis

They go to the tattoo parlor together. She isn’t quite certain where she got the idea. Maybe it was another pair of tiny feet tattooed behind someone’s ear. Maybe it was a photograph she saw in some ad on the internet. But one night, he was tracing her tattoo as they lay in bed, and she said, out of nowhere, “You should get one. For Father’s Day.” When he hadn’t said anything, she had said, “It might be a way to feel in control of your body and your life. It was for me.”

He had picked up her hand and kissed her fingers. “We should go together, Scully.”

She researches the local parlors, reading the reviews and looking at the artists’ portfolios. She wants strong clear lines. She wants a steady hand. If anyone’s going to mark her skin again, she wants something she can be proud of. She doesn’t regret the last one exactly - it marked a moment in an appropriate way, though the consequences were disproportionate - but she wants something that she can be proud of this time, to commemorate the birth of her son. She wants something that she’ll love to see on Mulder’s body. 

They design it together: a W nestled on top of an M, with an S interlaced between them and the date of his birth underneath. He plans to get his over his heart. She touches the place on her hip where she wants to be marked. It isn’t quite over her uterus, but it’s closer to the place where she carried him for nine months, and reminds her of the way she held him when they walked around the house. 

In the parlor, she goes first. Mulder holds her hand. Scully bites her lip against the delicious sting of the needle. It isn’t quite as evocative as the first time - this tattoo is less involved and takes much less time - but she still feels the surge as her body responds. How well she’s conditioned herself to accept pain, that she enjoys it on some level now. How far she’s come in her life.

When it’s Mulder’s turn, she watches as they shave his chest, her fingers interlaced with his. He squeezes her hand hard at the first touch of the needle. She soothes him, stroking the back of his hand. 

He’s dazed when they’re done, a faraway glint in his eye. He looks down at the bandage on his chest. She shifts the waistband of her pants so that it doesn’t chafe the taped gauze on her hip. 

“Happy Father’s Day,” she says, and he kisses her as the artist swipes her card.


End file.
